 Nor should we forget that the first real use of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction was Nagel’s in The Possibility of Altruism. There Nagel tried to prove that all reasons must be agent-neutral on pain of a kind of practical solipsism. Nagel eventually abandoned this argument in light of objections from Nicholas Sturgeon (see Sturgeon 1974), but the argument is ingenious and Nagel may have abandoned it prematurely. If any such argument could ever be made to work then we might be able to settle a wide range of difficult issues in normative philosophy without simply appealing to first-order intuitions about cases which so often seems to lead to philosophical stalemate. Moreover, if an argument like Nagel’s could be made to work then its implications would be dramatic. Not only egoistic reasons but arguably deontological reasons and reasons arising out of special relations to one’s nearest and dearest would stand refuted, as would what Nagel later referred to as ‘reasons of autonomy’ (see Nagel 1986: 165). Furthermore, Nagel is not the only one to have offered abstract considerations in favor of the thesis that all reasons are agent-neutral. For example, some of Derek Parfit’s work on personal identity is supposed to undermine the importance of personal identity as such, and that in turn might undermine the tenability of agent-relativity (see Parfit 1984).