 The third hurdle exists even if the first two are crossed adequately. This hurdle is to deal with the seeming demand of deontological ethics that on occasion one’s categorical obligations require one to preserve the purity of one’s own moral agency at the cost of having one’s actions make the world be in a morally worse state of affairs—at least, “worse” in the agent-neutral sense of the word used by consequentialists. Patient-centered versions of deontology cannot easily escape this problem, as we have shown. It is not even clear that they have the conceptual resources to make agency important enough to escape this moral paradox. Yet even agent-centered versions face this paradox; having the conceptual resources (of agency and agent-relative reasons) is not the same as making it plausible just how a secular, objective morality can allow each person’s agency to be so uniquely crucial to that person.