Kevin:  Here are some notes that I have posted in past courses.  They may help with your reading.  For the independent study, you should omit anything from the regular course that involves Gauthier and probably the feminist ethics too (unless you are especially interested in either).  If you want, in lieu of summaries, you could write up answers to the exam questions for any or all of the people to be discussed.  I think that given the difficulty of this material, if you just write something of about 2 pages on each figure, your final project need not be a formal paper.  In fact, if you just want to write, say, 3-5 pages where you try to cap off the reading by saying which of these you think is closest to being right and why (or which is the craziest, if you want to be pessimistic), then that would be fine.  

Just to review, you should be looking at:

Hare

Gewirth

Rawls (instead of Gauthier)--see the lecture notes for what to read of A Theory of Justice

Parfit

Williams

Kagan (parts--basically the parts discussed in the lecture notes)

If you've done any of the reading on intuitionism, that's also fine, though if you have not, you can omit it as well.  In any event, you should at some point have a look at the page (in the lecture notes below) on meta-ethics.  There's no need to do any writing about this, but it's worth taking a look at just to get a feel for some of the terminology. 

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