ABSTRACT
It is important that the reasons which people believe others have to consider their interests should not refer to them specifically as they are. There are to be no personal pronouns in the statements of altruistic reasons. Thomas Nagel's remarks about desire appear, to be the result of two mistakes: confusing desires with feelings and conditions with causes. As preparation for his positive argument for the contrary thesis, Nagel engages in an extended discussion of prudence, defined as concern for peoples' future. Instead, he reverts to prudence and suggests that the argument for altruism parallels it. The idea seems to be this: Where prudence required acknowledging the "reality" of one's future self, altruism requires acknowledging the "reality" of other selves. Stephen Darwall has a different diagnosis of the issue. In his view, the problem is that the DBR thesis accepts what he calls coherentism, meaning belief that rationality is coherence of means with ends.
