 One traditional answer—much favoured by the utilitarians—is that these sorts of thoughts only go to show that the point of blame and punishment is prospective (deterrence-based), not retrospective (desert-based). There are reasons for thinking that blame and punishment cannot be made sense of in this instrumental fashion (cp. UFA: 124, 1985: 178). “From the inside”, both notions seem essentially retrospective, so that if a correct understanding of them said that they were really fictions serving a prospective social function, no one who knew that could continue to use these notions “from the inside”: that is, the notions would have proved unstable under reflection for this person, who would thereby have lost some ethical knowledge. If this gambit fails, another answer—favoured by Kantians, but available to utilitarians too—is that the law would need to engage in an impossible degree of mind-reading to pick up all and only those cases of mens rea that deserve punishment irrespective of the outcomes. Even if this is the right thing to say about the law, the answer cannot be transposed to the case of morality: morality contrasts with the law precisely because it is supposed to apply even to the inner workings of the mind. Thus, morality presumably ought to be just as severe on the attempted murderer and the reckless but lucky motorist as it is on their less fortunate doubles.