 More importantly, no contingent feature of the situation could plausibly figure in an explanation of why the leap year fact is not a moral reason in a given case. Indeed, because the leap year fact could never be a reason its failure to be a reason here will in no way depend on any of the contingent features of this case. So none of those contingent features of the case at hand will figure in an explanation of why that fact is not a moral reason here. If the leap year fact were sometimes a reason then things would be very different. For in that case the contingent features that distinguish the situation in which it is a reason from those in which it is not a moral reason could intelligibly figure in an explanation of why the fact is not a moral reason here. Moreover, if asked to cite some particular contingent feature of the situation that explains why that fact is not a moral reason here any sane moral agent would simply be perplexed. Hence for any default principle citing a patently absurd candidate reason (and whose consequent is not necessarily true) there will be possible instantiations of that principle in which the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. This line of argument is perfectly general, so any principle citing a putative reason in its antecedent which could never actually be a moral reason (and whose consequent can be false; principles with tautologous consequents will of course be trivially true on anybody’s account) will turn out to be false. The only reason to doubt that the antecedent would sometimes be true was the thought that the ‘no feature of the situation explains…’ clause is always trivially false. Since this rests on a failure to distinguish explanations in general from explanations cast in terms of contingent features, it is reasonable to conclude that default principles are not all vacuously true simply in virtue of their logical form. So default principles can safely be invoked to articulate the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction and thereby capture Nagel’s basic idea without making the distinction useless to radical moral particularists like Dancy.