 If we take this way out, then the moral demand not to rob banks will turn out to be grounded not on universally-applicable moral reasons, but on something more like Humean empathy. Williams himself thinks that this is, in general, a much better way to ground moral demands than the appeal to reasons (“Having sympathetic concern for others is a necessary condition of being in the world of morality”, 1972: 26; cp. 1981: 122, 1985 Ch.2). In this he stands outside the venerable tradition of rationalism in ethics, which insists that if moral demands cannot be founded on moral reasons, then there is something fundamentally suspect about morality itself. It is this tradition that is threatened by the internal reasons thesis.