 Discussions of indirect consequentialism often proceed as if the correct moral standard could, in principle, be applied directly to any given circumstance and, if so applied, would indicate the morally right action(s) to take. Leaving aside whether this is true of (some) consequentialist principles, many claim that it is not true of other candidate moral standards. Consider, for example, principles such as “all persons must be treated as moral equals”, or “property rights must be respected”, or, to borrow a less morally loaded example from Onora O’Neill, “teachers must assign work appropriate to their students’ abilities” (O’Neill 1996: 73–77). Such principles may not yield determinate guidance in concrete circumstances even given a full array of non-moral facts. To be properly applied, such principles may require additional moral judgment. We must determine just which individuals are persons and what it is to treat persons as moral equals. We must determine which claims to property correspond to valid rights and what invasions of property amount to a failure to respect those rights. May an exhausted runner harmlessly trespass in order to cool off beneath the shade of another person’s tree? We must even decide how difficult is too difficult when it comes to challenging students. The obstacle to using the standard as a direct guide to conduct is not that our cognitive resources come up short, but that the standard is itself not yet sufficiently determinate. This situation presents an opportunity for principles to play a guiding role by helping to fill in the normative content of higher level standards. (Whether such guiding principles would themselves count as non-ultimate standards is a question we here set aside.) Importantly, however, guiding principles in this sense need not make fully determinate the higher level principles that they help to fill out. They may, instead, explicitly identify further questions to be settled—whether by other principles or by judgment. For example, the principle that a duly convicted criminal ought to receive only the amount of punishment he deserves is highly abstract. How ought we to determine whether a punishment is deserved? The further principle that the punishment ought to be proportional to the crime may direct us to find a way to proportionately rank less and more serious crimes, and it may thus point us part, but not all, of the way towards complying with the higher level principle. 