 There are several moves that an opponent of perspectivism can make in response here. She can concede that an agent who acts according to his epistemic perspective but guided by a false belief acts rationally, but deny that acting rationally requires that the agent act for normative reasons. Instead, the objectivist may say, acting rationally only requires acting in a way that is consistent with one’s beliefs, so long as these are themselves rational. This response could rely on, e.g., Derek Parfit’s conception of rationality, which requires acting guided by one’s real or apparent reasons (Parfit 2001, an “apparent reason” is a falsehood that an agent believes to be true, and treats as a normative reason but which is not a normative reason; see also Kolodny 2005). As for the justification of action, the objectivist can deny that the actions of agents who act in ignorance or guided by a mistaken belief are justified. Whether the action is justified, the objectivist will say, depends purely on whether the facts make it the right thing to do, and not on the agent’s beliefs. So in the cake example above, the action of offering the poisoned cake to his guests is not justified: there is no normative reason that makes it the right thing to do. And that is so regardless of what the agent knows or believes. A different question, the objectivist will say, is whether an agent who does something wrong because of his false beliefs or ignorance is himself justified and/or blameworthy for so acting. If our host’s ignorance about the poison is not culpable, he will most likely not be blameworthy and the agent may be justified. But in saying this, the objectivist need not be conceding that the action was justified, i.e., done for a normative reason, only that the host may be exculpated for doing the wrong thing. As Austin noted (1957), we must distinguish between a justification and an excuse. When accused of wrongdoing, one may offer a justification, which aims to show that in fact the thing done was right because there was reason for doing it. Alternatively, one may offer an excuse: admit that one did the wrong thing but plead to be partly or wholly exculpated—for instance, because it was done out of ignorance or mistake. (There are other excuses, such as accidents or coercion but those need not concern us here.) To return to the cake example, our agent might be excused for doing the wrong thing (poisoning the guests) if he was non-culpably ignorant about the poison. By contrast, it might be possible to give a justification for poisoning the guests: for instance, that they were in fact some psychopaths intent on causing his family mortal harm. If so, poisoning them with the cake may have been the right thing to do and, depending on whether our agent was aware of the relevant facts and acted guided by them, it may be that he was justified in poisoning them. This example shows how questions about normative reasons bear directly on the justification of agents, as distinct from the justification of their actions, by raising questions about motivating reasons, to which we now turn.