  A more conciliatory strategy is to claim ambiguity in the notion of a ‘reason’. In one sense there are external reasons; we might call them ‘institutional’ or ‘pseudo’-reasons (Mackie 1977; Joyce 2001). But the spirit of internalism is preserved in the claim that these are not genuine practical reasons, about which an internalist thesis is correct. Recognizing the legitimacy of ascribing these other kinds of reasons may suggest softening the distinction between internal and external reasons even further; it has been proposed that what counts as a ‘genuine reason’ is determined by the concerns characterizing the context of discourse (Finlay 2006). So, for example, we may appropriately judge that the pain a certain action would cause is a reason for a sadist not to perform the action, because the salient concern in the context is our compassion for others. This view would prompt us to abandon existence internalism about practical ‘reasons’ (reasons claims are made relative to the concerns salient in the conversation, and not necessarily to the motivations of the agent). On this view of reasons, however, an agent can have reasons that count as genuine in a given context, but that he can ignore without irrationality. Such a view can preserve the spirit of internalism by claiming that the rational force of these reasons for any agent depends upon his desires or motivations.