 Very roughly, then, the basic idea of Williams’ internal reasons thesis is that we cannot have genuine reasons to act that have no connection whatever with anything that we care about. His positive defense of the thesis can be roughly stated as follows: since it must be possible for an agent to act for a reason, reasons must be capable of explaining actions. This argument, it should be noted, brings together a normative and a descriptive concept in a robustly naturalistic manner. The notion of a reason, he argues, is inextricably bound up with the notion of explanation. Absent a motive which can be furthered by some action, it seems impossible for an agent to actually perform the action except under conditions of false information. If an external reason is one that is supposed to obtain in the absence of the relevant motive even under conditions of full information, then external reasons can never explain actions, and hence cannot be reasons at all (1981: 107).