 Of course, we might wonder how significant the threat really is. As we paraphrased it, the internal reasons thesis says that “we cannot have genuine reasons to act that have no connection whatever with anything that we care about”. Let us take up this notion of “connections”. As Williams stresses, the internal reasons thesis is not the view that, unless I actually have a given motive M, I cannot have an internal reason corresponding to  M.[27]  The view is rather that I will have no internal reason unless either (a) I actually have a given motivation M in my “subjective motivational set” (“my S”: 1981: 102), or (b) I could come to have M by following “a sound deliberative route” (MSH 35) from the beliefs and motivations that I do actually have—that is, a way of reasoning that builds conservatively on what I already believe and care about. So, to cite Williams’ own example (1981: 102), the internal reasons thesis is not falsified by the case of someone who is motivated to drink gin and believes that this is gin, hence is motivated to drink this—where “this” is in fact petrol. We are not obliged to say, absurdly, that this person has a genuine internal reason to drink petrol, nor to say, in contradiction of the internal reasons thesis, that this person has a genuine external reason not to drink what is in front of him. Rather we should note the fact that, even though he is not actually motivated not to drink the petrol, he would be motivated not to drink it if he realised that it was petrol. He can get to the motivation not to drink it by a sound deliberative route from where he already is; hence, by (b), he has an internal reason not to drink the petrol.