The problem of evil, the social contract, and the history of ethics

This review article discusses five essays from the recently published Recla iming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, and argues they are uni ted with Rawls's own recent work by a concern to address an unduly neglecte d aspect of the traditional problem of evil, which is whether humanity is w orthy of existence given the evil of which we are capable, suggesting that the social contract tradition can be understood historically as attempting to deal with this problem.