 Early in his career, Williams sat on a number of British government committees and commissions, most famously chairing the Committee on Obscenity and Censorship of 1979, which applied Mill’s “harm principle” to the topic, concluding that restrictions were out of place where no harm could reasonably be thought to be done, and that by and large society has other problems which are more worth worrying about. At this time, he also began to publish books. His first book, Morality: an introduction to ethics (1972), already announced many of the themes that were to be central to his work. Already evident, in particular, were his questioning attitude to the whole enterprise of moral theory, his caution about the notion of absolute truth in ethics, and his hostility to utilitarianism and other moral theories that seek to systematise moral life and experience on the basis of such an absolute; as he later put it, “There cannot be any very interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is… nor… can there be an ethical theory, in the sense of a philosophical structure which, together with some degree of empirical fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning” (1981: ix-x). His second book, Problems of the Self (= PS; 1973), was a collection of his philosophical papers from 1956 to 1972; his further collections of essays (Moral Luck, 1981, and Making Sense of Humanity, 1998) were as much landmarks in the literature as this first collection. (Posthumously three further collections appeared: In the Beginning was the Deed (ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn), 2005, A Sense of the Past, 2005, and Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006); at least the second and third of these three collections are already having a considerable impact on philosophy, partly because they include essays that were already well-known and widely discussed in their original places of appearance.) In 1973 Williams also brought out a co-authored volume, Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J.J.C.Smart (= UFA); his contribution to this (the Against bit) being, in the present writer’s view, a tour de force of philosophical demolition. Then in 1978 Williams produced Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. This study could be described as his most substantial work outside ethics, but for the fact that the key theme of the book is the impossibility of Descartes’ ambition to give a foundation, in the first-personal perspective, to the “absolute conception” of the world, a representation of the world “as it is anyway” that includes, explains, and rationally interrelates all other possible representations of the world (Williams 1968: 65)—a theme that is in an important sense not outside ethics at all.