According to the balancing view of obligation, one ought to do something iff doing so is favoured by the balance of reasons, i.e., iff one’s reasons for doing it outweigh one’s reason for not doing it. According to standard views in deontic logic, what one ought to do is governed by substantive logical rules. Combining such a view with the balancing view then allows us to derive broadly logical principles governing the balance of reasons for logically related actions. Such principles, however, cry out for explanation in terms of corresponding principles governing individual reasons, their weights, and the ways they combine. A pressing question therefore emerges for proponents of the balancing view: Is there a plausible set of such principles which generates a plausible logic of obligation? My talk addresses the special case of that question which targets so-called standard deontic logic and argues for an optimistic conclusion: I identify a set of natural, though not uncontroversial principles governing reasons that generates, via the balancing view, an essentially standard deontic logic. I go on to briefly consider possible variations on the principles and discuss their relation to similar principles that have been proposed in the literature.