 Gaus offers the most prominent response. The benefits of shared norms can populate an otherwise empty set of proposals. The idea here is that we all rank some rules ahead of no rule governing some issue. While we regard some rules as sub-optimal, they improve our relations with others. This reply is a sociological response: people prefer sub-optimal ethical rules to no rules because empty sets are debilitating. Both Rawls and Gaus provide such arguments. (Rawls 2002, 124–128, Gaus 2011, 303–333, 389–408, 424–447).