 Both of these views—hedonism and deontology—approach morality from the perspective of the individual person. This individual is treated as a fully formed moral agent independent of any social relations. Each is able to decide what is morally required by consulting a formal principle in their mind (e.g., the Kantian categorical imperative) or their own feeling states. In responding to individualism, which he thinks ultimately rests on a false theory of human nature, Bradley’s worry as far as morality is concerned is that it reflects a kind of egoistic antagonism to other people that makes morality impossible: if the self we are ”to realize is an atom, a unit which repels other units, and can have nothing in itself but what is exclusively its, its feelings, its pleasure and pain—then it is certain that it can stand to others, with their pleasures and pains, only in external relation; and since it is the end, the others must be the means, and nothing but the means. On such a basis morality is impossible É“ (Ethical Studies, p, 115). It is impossible because, since morality requires being an organic whole, social relations that are external defeat that goal. The sort of confrontational individualism in which each asserts his or her will against the wills of others generates the intolerable situation that contract theories take to be the motivation for creating the social contract, which in its turn becomes another form of external constraint on individuals that prevents the community from becoming anything other than a mere collection of egoistic, atomic individuals.