However, Medlin cast the challenge specifically in terms of egoistic reasons and that has important dialectical implications.
Egoistic reasons are paradigmatic agent-relative reasons, and it should be trivial that they come out as such rather than a matter of great controversy.
So perhaps egoistic reasons can, after all, be appreciated even from an ideally objective perspective on any of a wide range of conceptions of objectivity.
Moreover, the same point applies not only to egoistic reasons but to all of the typically invoked paradigms of agent-relativity.
Not only egoistic reasons but arguably deontological reasons and reasons arising out of special relations to one's nearest and dearest would stand refuted, as would what Nagel later referred to as 'reasons of autonomy' (see Nagel 1986: 165).
It is not hard to see that the proposed reading of the distinction should easily pass the litmus test given above, classifying objective utilitarian reasons as agent-neutral (as with (P)) and egoistic reasons as agent-relative.
For a start, a plausible litmus test for any proposed version of the distinction is that it uncontroversially classifies egoistic reasons as agent-relative and utilitarian reasons (to maximize happiness, simpliciter) as agent-neutral.
Parfit, too, has recently argued that Sidgwick's two standpoints approach failed to capture how egoistic reasons can be weaker than omnipersonal ones (Parfit, 2011), though Smith (2009) has defended Sidgwick's construction of the problem.
For we might well be willing to abandon egoistic reasons, but if we also had to give up on the intelligibility of deontology then the costs of expressivism might well begin to seem too steep.
Moreover, according to Parfit, Sidgwick drew the conflict too narrowly, between impartial and egoistic reasons, when in fact we might have personal and partial, but not self-interested reasons to act wrongly – or to care about the well-being of others – and impartial reasons to act wrongly.
