 There are a couple of central difficulties for this position. The first is that it seems to imply that those inside and those outside the Judeo-Christian practice of moral discourse have never disagreed when one has affirmed a claim of the form ‘ φ-ing is obligatory’ and the other denied a claim of that form. For they do not, on Adams’ account, mean the same thing when they use these terms. In atheistic moral discourse, a masterful user of the language can say ‘it is not true that God has commanded φ-ing, but φ-ing is nonetheless obligatory’; in Judeo-Christian moral discourse, on Adams’ view, one shows oneself to be either unintelligible or not a masterful user of moral language if one were to speak thus. Adams was aware of this difficulty, and attempted to mitigate it: he argued that the agreement over which items the term ‘obligatory’ applied to, and the appropriate attitudinal and volitional responses to those things correctly described as ‘obligatory,’ made possible substantive moral discourse (Adams 1973, pp. 116–120). But all this seems to do is to explain how a simulacrum of genuine moral discourse is preserved; it does not show that what we get is the real thing.