 One vivid instance of the escapability of moral obligations is Williams’ own example of “Gauguin”, a (fictionalised) artist who deliberately rejects a whole host of moral obligations (to his family, for instance) because he finds it more “important”, in this sense, to be a painter. As Williams comments (1981: 23), “While we are sometimes guided by the notion that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were universally respected and all men were of a disposition to affirm it, we have, in fact, deep and persistent reasons to be grateful that that is not the world we have”; in other words, moral obligation is escapable because it is not in the deepest human interest that it should be inescapable. (“Because”: the fact that this sort of inference is possible in ethics is itself a revealing fact about the nature of ethics.)