 The designation “thick concept” for concepts that combine evaluation and non-evaluative description originates in Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Williams 1985). Williams seems to have drawn the label “thick” from the notion of “thick description” introduced by Gilbert Ryle and adapted to other purposes by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Ryle characterizes thick descriptions as descriptions of human activities not as mere bodily motions but as involving intentional and purposive detail which help us to understand those activities (Ryle 1968). In Geertz’s terminology thickness is a matter of the culturally specific significance of such details (Geertz 1973). Unlike thick concepts, thick descriptions in Ryle’s and Geertz’s senses needn’t involve evaluation. But one connection to Williams’s terminology is that many thick concepts incorporate culturally specific information (cf. Scanlon 2003). Different societies might have sufficiently different understandings of courage to have distinct concepts of it, and some might lack a concept altogether. There is similar cultural specificity to the kind of sexual morality in which chaste plays a role and the kind of honor culture in which noble has a point (cf. Williams 1985: 141ff.). While the terminology of “thick” and “thin” concepts originates in Williams, he wasn’t the first to spot the distinction he uses these labels to pick out. For instance, when R.M. Hare distinguishes “primarily” and “secondarily” evaluative words in The Language of Morals, his examples of the former are paradigmatic thin concepts and some of his examples of the latter are paradigmatic thick concepts. (Hare 1952: 121–2; see also the discussion of persuasive definitions in Stevenson 1938.)