Ted Zenzinger

Rules of justice are often viewed as the product of a contract between individuals who would most like to act with impunity, and who also fear being acted upon by others with impunity. Rules of justice that stem from such a compromise are unstable: given their preferences all who are party to the contract will renege on it when the opportunity to do so arises. A key challenge to social contract theory has been to eliminate this instability. I explore four attempts to meet this challenge, those offered by Hobbes, Gauthier, Hume, and Rawls. ;I conclude that both Hobbes and Gauthier fall prey to a dilemma, namely that the aspects of human nature to which they appeal to explain the origin of instability also ensure that no mechanism to remove the instability can be established. Hume, I argue, does not face this difficulty, but his solution to the problem of stability involves the imposition of a single universal and comprehensive conception of the good, which I contend is an unreasonable requirement. Rawls, I believe, offers the first step toward a resolution of the problem of stability by holding that we must begin by removing the causes of instability. This is accomplished by first determining the fundamental ideas of a society, and second, by working up principles of justice supported by an overlapping consensus. In replacing compromise with consensus, Rawls seeks to remove the causes of the problem of stability. I argue that it will not be possible to fully replace compromise with consensus, and that a linking of consensus with compromise, while providing more stability than compromise alone, will not resolve the problem of stability. I conclude with several remarks on Rawls as a Post-Modern thinker

This paper joins the conversation on the relationship between Spinoza and George Eliot. After critically examining Atkins’s claim that the novels of George Eliot, as exemplified by Adam Bede, are a presentation of Spinoza’s philosophy stripped of the geometrical method, the paper explores Eliot’s philosophical engagement with Spinoza’s views on sympathy and the imagination. Thus, Eliot is read as a philosopher engaging with the arguments of Spinoza, rather than as someone representing his views in novel form.