Moral philosophy, Williams admits, can best start with Socrates' question. But philosophers have made progress since the ancient Greeks, and we should now turn to a simpler question. Socrates asked:
Q1: Which kind of life is best? How do we have most reason to live?
Williams suggests that each of us should ask instead:
Q2: What do I basically want?
When he discusses Socrates' question, Williams writes:
The answer... might be: the best way for me to live is to do at any given time what I most want to do at that time.
This is roughly the answer that Williams himself accepts. When we are deciding what to do, Williams believes, we need not ask which aims, acts, or outcomes would be intrinsically better or worse in the reasonimplying senses. Nothing could be in these senses better or worse. It is enough to ask certain questions about what we want.
— Derek Parfit, On What Matters