In this chapter I provide an overview of the main ideas and problems that I shall address in this work and sketch some approaches to their solutions. Section 1 introduces the idea of a “social morality.” Social morality, I argue in Part One, constitutes the basic framework for a cooperative and mutually beneficial social life. Social morality provides rules that we are required to act upon and which provide the basis for authoritative demands of one person addressed to another. Section 2 analyzes this authority relation, and its apparent tension with understanding others as free and equal moral persons. How can free and equal moral persons claim authority to prescribe to other free and equal moral persons? A general solution to this problem, advanced by Rousseau and Kant, is that authority and freedom can be reconciled if each freely endorses the authority of morality. As I argue, a publicly justified morality – one that the reason of each endorses – allows each to remain free while subject to moral authority.