 Another inappropriate commitment arising from the obligation out-obligation in principle, famously spelled out at 1981: 18, is the agent’s commitment to a “thought too many”. If an agent is in a situation where he has to choose which of two people to rescue from some catastrophe, and chooses the one of the two people who is his wife, then “it might have been hoped by some people (for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife.” The morality system, Williams is suggesting, makes nonsense of the agent’s action in rescuing his wife: its insistence on generality obscures the particular way in which this action is really justified for the agent. Its real justification has nothing to do with the impersonal and impartial standards of morality, and everything to do with the place in the agent’s life of the person he chooses to rescue. For Williams, the standard of “what makes life meaningful” is always deeper and more genuinely explanatory than the canon of moral obligation; the point is central, and we shall come back to it below in sections 3 and 4.