 This view—that there are defeasible moral principles we can legitimately use in deliberation—may seem at odds with the particularist claim that there are no pro tanto moral principles. However, Little sees no such tension. The existence of a principle that expresses a pro tanto reason or obligation entails that certain features have intrinsic moral natures that give them a default “moral valence”. To say, “Lying is pro tanto wrong”, is to assert that lying has a default negative moral valence, that the feature of being a lie in and of itself makes an action worse, even if that feature’s moral contribution could be outweighed by other considerations. However, according to Little, the existence of defeasible generalizations doesn’t entail any such thing; it simply turns out that lying tends to be wrong in the contexts most humans tend to encounter, even though lying, in and of itself, has no intrinsic moral valence. Since the latter is (close to) a mere defeasible statistical generalization, its use can allow one to justifiably come to moral beliefs even though (a) it’s strictly false and (b) it strictly says nothing about the intrinsic moral nature of a property.