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

This review article discusses five essays from the recently published Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, and argues they are united with Rawls's own recent work by a concern to address an unduly neglected aspect of the traditional problem of evil, which is whether humanity is worthy 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.