 Given holism, a true and non-trivial principle about reasons must accommodate the possibility of defeaters. This can be done in one of two ways. First, one could try to list all of the different possible defeaters in the antecedent and claim that none is present. However, a hardy particularist may insist that this is a fool’s game, on the grounds that there is no saying in advance of considering all of the indefinitely many possible contexts in which the putative reason occurs whether we have a complete list of all possible defeaters. After all, part of the particularist idea is that morality is far too complex for any such principles ever to be within our ken. Particularists allow that there may in principle be some infinitely long generalization which lists all the defeaters, but deny that this counts as a principle because it is not explanatory. However, there is a second approach, and this is the approach which inspires the proposed conception of default principles. Instead of trying to list all of the possible defeaters and countervailing reasons one could instead quantify over them. The proposal is most easily understood through illustrative examples. Returning to our example of pleasure and sadism, consider the following default principle: