 It is also quite easy to see how this distinction might be confused with the agent-relative/agent-neutral one. Suppose one embraces the tempting view that all reasons for acting must be teleological in form, which is to say that any principle underwriting a reason for acting must individuate actions in terms of the states of affairs that they promote. However, the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction itself should not be understood as incorporating such a highly controversial assumption, and the version of the distinction proposed in section IV as an improvement on Nagel and Parfit therefore does not incorporate it. Given the assumption of teleology, though, and given the rejection of holism in the theory of reasons (which Nagel’s universality implicitly does reject) it would indeed follow that agent-neutrality and being essentially shared are necessarily co-extensive, since any universal (in Nagel’s sense) agent-neutral principle will then have the following form: