An unlimited requirement to maximize overall well-being strikes most of us, Liam Murphy included, as absurdly demanding. A plausible moral theory, we think, will limit such demands. One way to avoid the oppressive thumb of such agent-neutral, impersonal principles is to reject a fundamental role for an impersonal moral standpoint. Thus, the excessive demands made by such agent-neutral principles can seem to lend support to approaches, such as contractarianism and virtue ethics, that locate whatever role there is for impersonal considerations within a broader moral framework. But in his Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, Murphy argues that agent-neutral principles, properly understood, generate their own limits. The excesses of traditional impersonal principles can be curbed from within the impersonal standpoint through appeal to considerations of fairness, considerations that philosophers have mistakenly thought to be available only to those who eschew a fundamental role for the impersonal standpoint. His engaging arguments for these and other related claims are the subject of this essay. Murphy argues that the utilitarian’s optimizing principle of beneficence, upon which agents are required to maximize overall well-being, does indeed make absurd demands. There are limits to what morality demands, and the optimizing principle violates such limits. But his argument for this conclusion is preceded by a repudiation of what he takes to be the standard arguments for these limits. At the center of all such arguments, he contends, is the argument that such a principle is