So far, we have understood practical reasoning as governed by the ideal of forming a legitimate general conception of the good. Most of the reasoning described so far seems completely teleological in character: A certain object appears to be good; we reflect on the adequacy of this appearance; we infer from the fact that this object appears to be good that other objects also appear to be good; and so on. Moreover, the good in question is an object of pursuit, the kind of thing that could be brought about in an action. For nonconsequentialists, this will seem like a serious strike against the theory; there seems to be no room in it, for instance, for deontological constraints. Concerns of this kind have made nonconsequentialist authors wary of the notion of good, and certainly of the notion of the good as something to be promoted or brought about. Scanlon, for instance, gives primacy to the notion of a reason and defends a “buck-passing” account of the good according to which “being good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons.” Moreover, Scanlon claims that various things we have reason to do, such as being good friends, cannot be understood as cases in which we have a reason to promote a certain good.