ABSTRACT
Social philosophy makes no exception, among social philosophers, it is a widely held assumption that a democracy society depends on specific normative resources of its members and cannot remain stable without these resources. This chapter outlines roughly, at least which normative resources the three authors regard as indispensable for a stable democracy. Habermas, when arguing for the importance of discourses as grounds for normative theory, makes one fundamental assumption: the participants of a discourse must at least partially be motivated by a rational motivation. Rational motivation leads what Habermas terms communicative action. According to Gauthier, moral problems arise due to PD situations. In a PD situation, the result of the participant's actions leaves all of them worse off. Ken Binmore has developed a contractarian approach which he calls naturalistic, as it employs, besides game-theoretic concepts, sociobiological concepts, too. A key idea of this naturalistic approach is to abandon all authorities legitimated by metaphysics.
