 In assessing a position like Hare’s, Williams and other critics often begin with the formidable difficulties involved in the project of deducing anything much about the structure of morality from the logic of moral language: see e.g., Geach, “Good and Evil”, Analysis 1956, and Williams 1972: 52–61. These difficulties are especially acute when the moral language we consider is basically just the words “ought” and “good” and their opposites. “If there is to be attention to language, then there should be attention to more of it” (Williams 1985: 127); the closest Williams comes to inheriting the ambitions of linguistic analysis is his defence of the notion of morally “thick concepts” (1985:  140–143)[7].  These—Williams gives coward, lie, brutality and gratitude as examples—are concepts that sustain an ethical load of a culturally-conditioned form, and hence succeed both in being action-guiding (for members of that culture), and in making available (to members of that culture) something that can reasonably be described as ethical knowledge. Given that my society has arrived at the concept of brutality, that is to say has got clear, at least implicitly, about the circumstances under which it is or is not applicable, there can be facts about brutality (hence, ethical facts) and also justified true  beliefs[8]  about brutality (hence, ethical knowledge). Moreover, this knowledge can be lost, and will be lost, if the concept and its social context is lost. (For a strikingly similar philosophical project to that suggested by this talk of thick concepts, cp. Anscombe 1958a, and Philippa Foot’s papers “Moral Beliefs” and “Moral Arguments”, both in her Virtues and Vices.)