 Williams’ Gauguin example, we have suggested, has force against the thesis that morality is inescapable. It also has force against the seventh thesis of the morality system, its insistence on “purity” and its denial of what Williams calls “moral luck”. To understand this notion, begin with the familiar legal facts that attempted murder is a different and less grave offence than murder, and that dangerous driving typically does not attract the same legal penalty if no one is actually hurt. Inhabitants of the morality system will characteristically be puzzled by this distinction. How can it be right to assign different levels of blame, and different punishments, to two agents whose mens rea was exactly the same—it was just that one would-be murderer dropped the knife and the other didn’t—or to two equally reckless motorists—one of whom just happened to miss the pedestrians while the other just happened to hit them?