 In 1996 Martin Hollis said that Williams had "a good claim to be the leading British philosopher of his day," but that, although he had a "lovely eye for the central questions," he had none of the answers. Alan Thomas identified Williams's contribution to ethics as an overarching scepticism about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy, explicitly articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) and Shame and Necessity (1993), in which he argued that moral theories can never reflect the complexities of life, particularly given the radical pluralism of modern societies.
