David Gauthier once said that the social contract offers ‘the only game in town’ if we hope for a rational morality. I argue that he’s correct. Morality consists of rules notionally directed at everyone everywhere. Only individual people are rational, and they have varying interests. The social contract proposes principles that everyone would, in view of their social and environmental circumstances, agree to as constraining their separate pursuits of their ends. There is no other rational way to understand morals, and so it is indeed the only game in town.

I focus on David Gauthier’s intriguing suggestion that actions are not to be evaluated directly but via an evaluation of deliberative procedures. I argue that this suggestion is misleading, since even the most direct evaluation of (intentional) actions involves the evaluation of different ways of deliberating about what to do. Relatedly, a complete picture of what an agent is or might be (intentionally) doing cannot be disentangled from a complete picture of how s/he is or might be deliberating. A more viable contrast concerns whether actions and deliberative procedures are properly evaluated on the whole or, instead, through time.

In a wide variety of related problems, a flexible but inextensible membrane is filled to capacity with incompressible fluid. In all such cases, the resulting shape satisfies a set of three simultaneous partial differential equations. At present there are no known solutions of any generality, and the main aim of this paper is to formulate the partial differential equations with a view to stimulating further interest in this important class of problems.