Rawls, John 1921-2002

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Rawls was one of the leading political philosophers of the twentieth century. His magisterial work, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971. That book was deeply influenced by philosophers in the social contract tradition, including John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially Immanuel Kant. A Theory of Justice stands with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Second Treatise as a classic statement of the contract view. In Rawls’s later work, epitomized in his book Political Liberalism, he rethought and clarified some of his earlier positions and made explicit a highly original philosophical methodology. In his last book, The Law of Peoples, Rawls used the social contract to approach problems of international justice.

John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921. He received his BA in philosophy from Princeton in January 1943. He entered the army shortly after graduating from college and saw combat in the Pacific theater during World War II. After his discharge from the military, Rawls returned to Princeton, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1949. In that year, he also married Margaret Fox, to whom he remained married until his death. Rawls spent 1950-1952 as an instructor at Princeton and 1952-1953 on a Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford. Upon his return to the United States, Rawls joined the philosophy department at Cornell. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 and to Harvard in 1962. Rawls remained a member of the Harvard faculty until he retired in 1991. He taught and published in retirement until ill health made it impossible for him to continue working. He died on November 24, 2002.

Rawls took the central problem of contemporary political philosophy to be that of framing a conception of justice that would be appropriate for liberal democracies existing under modern conditions. At the heart of a conception of justice, Rawls thought, are norms for distributing the “primary goods” generated by social cooperation and distributed by society’s “basic structure.” These goods are rights, liberties, income, wealth, opportunity, and the social bases of self-respect. The basic structure is the set of a society’s most important economic, legal, and political institutions. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defended two principles of justice governing the basic structure’s distribution of these goods: (1) Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. (2) Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Rawls defended these principles by arguing that they are the solution to an important choice problem. More specifically, he argued that they would be adopted in a version of the social contract that he called “the original position.” In the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, the contract is arrived at in “the state of nature.” Both Hobbes and Locke imagine this state to be one in which there is no government and in which human beings have God-given authority over themselves, but in which they also know that living under a common human authority would be advantageous. The choice problem confronting parties in the state of nature, according to Hobbes and Locke, is that of determining what form that authority should assume. Hobbes famously argued that parties faced with this problem would choose to delegate their powers to an absolute sovereign, while Locke defended limited sovereignty. In the original position, parties do not choose a form of government. Instead, they choose principles of justice to regulate their society. They choose from a menu of principles by asking which ones would guarantee them the greatest stock of primary goods if basic institutions conformed to them.

In the states of nature described by Hobbes and Locke, parties are free and are roughly equal in power. Despite their equality, they have information about themselves and their situation that they could, in principle, use to their advantage. In Locke’s theory, for example, parties could know the extent of their property holdings, since Locke held that property rights are established before agreement on the terms of the social contract is reached. Differences in the parties’ holdings could give some an advantage over others, and so parties’ knowledge of differences in their holdings could affect the outcome of the contract.

According to Rawls’s description of the original position, parties in it are deprived of all information about themselves and of all but the most general information about society. Given these restrictions on information, Rawls argued that it would be rational for parties in the original position to decide on principles using the maximin rule of rational choice. This rule enjoins choosers to select the option that guarantees the best worst outcome. Applied to the original position, maximin enjoins parties to maximize the stock of primary goods they would enjoy if they were in the worst-off social position. Rawls argued that parties choosing in the original position, using maximin, would adopt his two principles. The first principle guarantees equal liberty. The second clearly imposes a strong restriction on economic inequality and requires that all have equal opportunities to secure positions of advantage. Equality of opportunity, in turn, requires far more than the absence of legal barriers to such positions. Rawls believed that social and economic class of origin should not affect life prospects. Fair equality of opportunity therefore requires systems of education and training sufficient to ensure that developed talents are widely dispersed. Equal liberty has long been a part of the liberal tradition. Part of Rawls’s own pioneering contribution was to show the resources of the social contract tradition could be deployed to defend equality of opportunity and highly economic egalitarianism as well.

The lack of information available in the original position, effected by what Rawls called “the veil of ignorance,” struck many rational choice theorists as an implausible stipulation. Rawls defended the informational constraints by arguing that the veil of ignorance merely makes vivid a condition we intuitively recognize as a plausible one to impose on our own reasoning about justice: Our thinking about what is right should not, we think, be distorted by information about what is to our own advantage. The veil of ignorance guarantees that the parties’ reasoning about justice will not be distorted in this way. Because parties in the original position are free, equal, and unbiased, Rawls argued, they are situated fairly. Because they are situated fairly, he concluded, the principles they would choose are fair. Rawls therefore called his conception of justice “justice as fairness.”

Modern liberal democracies exist under conditions of religious and philosophical pluralism. In Political Liberalism and other later work, Rawls argued that justice as fairness could secure agreement about basic justice among citizens of democracies in these conditions. It could do so because justice as fairness does not begin with metaphysical theses about the human person or the human good that are drawn from any one religious or philosophical view. Rather, it begins with ideas about the person, about political argument, and about social cooperation that are implicit in the public culture of democratic societies. For example, Rawls argued that the conditions of the original position “represent” fundamental elements of human moral personality. Rawls’s argument that political philosophy should begin with ideas latent in public culture seemed to some philosophers to introduce a highly questionable method into political theorizing. But, Rawls countered, liberal thinkers in the early modern period sought a basis for political agreement that could be shared by citizens of diverse religions. To claim that political philosophy should not presuppose the truth of a contentious metaphysical theory is to do no more, he maintained, than to extend their principle of toleration from religion to philosophy itself. Because the principle of religious toleration is so much a part of the liberal tradition, Rawls’s imaginative extension of the principle of toleration—like his defense of economic egalitarianism and fair equality of opportunity—counts as an important part of his enduring bequest to that tradition.

SEE ALSO Democracy; Hobbes, Thomas; Justice; Justice, Distributive; Locke, John; Maximin Principle; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Social Contract; State of Nature

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeman, Samuel, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Paul Weithman

RAWLS, JOHN

Bordley John Rawls (1921–2002) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, educated in philosophy at Princeton University, and served in the military in the Pacific theater during World War II. He taught at Cornell University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a professor at Harvard University where he taught philosophy for almost forty years. His theory of justice transformed twentieth-century political philosophy and has important implications for understanding the ethics of science and technology in terms of political governance and economics of the marketplace. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 24.

Major Works

Rawls's major works include A Theory of Justice (1971), The Law of Peoples (1993), Political Liberalism (1993), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). His writings have been widely distributed and translated into more than twenty languages.

Rawls developed his thought against the background of two existing philosophies: (a) utilitarianism, which employs the principle "the greatest good for the greatest number," and (b) emotivism, which claims moral and political judgments are basically personal or social preferences. Rawls finds both views inadequate, and in A Theory of Justice argues at length for a concept of "justice as fairness," which entails the economically "just distribution" of societal benefits and burdens through democratic procedures and institutions. Political procedures for advancing justice must run parallel to those of technological and economic progress.

In effect, Rawls revivifies theories of justice, rights, and international law that have their roots in Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and social contract theory, as a broad response to totalitarianism and post–World War II inequities. Also, as a World War II veteran, Rawls authored "Fifty Years after Hiroshima," in which he argued against the use of the atomic bomb, and the employment of nuclear technology for nuclear weaponry. The crux of Rawls's argument may be found in a set of hypothetical conditions as follows. Imagine yourself in some "original position" in which you know that you are going to be placed in a complex world among persons with different abilities living in complex social institutional arrangements. At the same time you are prohibited by a "veil of ignorance" from knowing which abilities you might be given or which social institutions you will initially occupy.

In such a situation, Rawls argues, all persons, being both rational and self-interested, would choose to structure their social world around two principles of justice. The first, the "equal liberty principle," would establish equal basic rights and liberties for all. The second, the "difference principle," would defend inequalities on two conditions: (a) equality of opportunity (positions open to all having comparable prospects, talents, and abilities) and (b) economic and social inequalities distributed to benefit those disadvantaged by their social position. Rawls's argument is that when people do not know what abilities or benefits, or deficits and liabilities they might be given, such frame of mind affects the social order they would accept as just or fair. Moreover, such a well-ordered society based upon these principles will justly pair political democracy with economic capitalism.

Since the democratic-inspired revolutions of the eighteenth century, liberal philosophers have argued that rational individualism, republican democracy, and capitalism together could do more than any other systems to increase human rights, opportunities, and goods for more people. Historically, however, philosophers have also noted the recurring divide between rich and poor. In Political Liberalism, Rawls thus charges future progress, whether in government or business, in science or technology, with a moral imperative: Use political liberalism to promote justice, to ensure equal rights, and to acquire human rights as well as economic ones.

Rawls's principles of justice remain critical in evaluating these future problems and progress. Reminding his readers, in The Law of Peoples, that burdens accompany goods, and responsibilities come with liberties, Rawls analyzed who and what institutions will bear these responsibilities and duties to provide just and more equitable rights in a world in which people are actually situated, and materially advantaged or disadvantaged. Rawls directly formulated definitive tenets for law, rights, and duties that must be publicly instituted to address ongoing concerns and conflicts of minorities, pluralities, or the majority of global peoples. Therein, cosmopolitan individuals, technical experts, scientists, political leaders, and multinational corporations alike could find the principles, laws, and procedures in place to address fairly their worldly operations, disputes, and affairs.

Assessment

Rawls's work has inspired countless commentaries and critical replies in the United States and abroad. For instance, from its first publication in 1971 to its revised edition in 1999, A Theory of Justice has been challenged by communitarians and feminists. Both argue that Theory is too abstract and individualistic, despite its broad global outreach to diverse peoples, governments, and cultures. Arguably, Rawls draws heavily from Kant's rationalist, individualistic ethics and political philosophy of contractarian government, whereby citizens and their states jointly contract and consent (implicitly and explicitly) to institute and legitimate the just rule of their government.

Rawls has been criticized not only from the left (communitarians and feminists) but also from the right (libertarians and free-market theorists). Most notably, Robert Nozick (1938–2002), Rawls's well-renown Harvard colleague, was also his life-long critic, promulgating a counter theory known as the "entitlement theory" of social justice. In short, Nozick's theory extends another long-standing Western trend, libertarianism, which, like political liberalism, also originated in the eighteenth century, starting with Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). Nozick wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) in direct response as a critique of Rawls's Theory of Justice. Nozick thereby enlivened visions of justice based upon free-market capitalism and a minimalist state, in which the state serves solely to protect its members from violence and theft, and hence should possess no rights to interfere with one's property acquisition, use, and distribution, nor with any technological innovations and enterprises, unless fraud and unlawful force have been committed or contracts breached.

Rawls's political liberalism provides critical assurance that rational principles of justice and ethical government can control global capitalism, biotechnology, and engineering enterprises, so as to assure more of the world's people that liberties, goods, and opportunities can be more fairly distributed. Because Rawls rejects the premise that the powers and forces of right, possessed by people who are merely empowered and advantaged by circumstance or their societal position, can legitimately constitute justice, his Theory can test the progress made, and that still must be made, toward expanding global liberties and economic justice. In demonstrating "justice as fairness," Rawls firmly reestablishes liberal political philosophy: In facing global pluralism—diverse beliefs, values, and bases for differing notions of good—politically just principles and powers for human rights-distribution are morally required to evaluate and improve the actual positions of individuals, states, and global peoples in working toward greater fairness.

MARY LENZI

SEE ALSO Human Rights;Justice;Liberalism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Freeman, Samuel, ed. (2003). The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rawls, John. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press. Rev. edition, 1999.

Rawls, John. (1996). Political Liberalism and the "Reply to Habermas." New York: Columbia University Press. Political Liberalism originally published in 1993.

Rawls, John. (1999). The Law of Peoples; with, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Includes a major reworking of the essay "The Law of Peoples," originally published in 1993, along with the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," originally published in 1997.

Rawls, John. (2000). Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rawls, John. (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

John Rawls

The American philosopher John Rawls (born 1921) was one of the most important political philosophers in the late 20th century. His A Theory of Justice developed principles of justice for a liberal society and challenged utilitarian political philosophy.

John Rawls, son of William Lee Rawls and Anna Abel Stump, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921. He graduated from the Kent School in 1939, completed a BA at Princeton University in 1943, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950. He was also a Fulbright Fellow at Oxford University (1952-1953). Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox in 1949, and they had four children.

His academic career ranged from being an instructor at Princeton University (1950-1952) to serving as assistant and associate professor at Cornell University, where he became full professor in 1962. Beginning in 1979 he was James Bryant Conant Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His achievements included serving as president of the American Association of Political and Legal Philosophers (1970-1972) as well as of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (1974). He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The author of numerous articles, Rawls was best known for his monumental A Theory of Justice (1971).

In A Theory of Justice Rawls returned to basic problems of political philosophy. He claimed to be working with the social contract tradition begun by such thinkers as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Rawls held that justice is the first virtue of social institutions and that the good of the whole society cannot override the inviolability that each person has founded on justice. Given this, his position is a challenge to utilitarianism, which holds that the good of the community can override the claims to justice by the individual.

Rawls was concerned only with social justice in A Theory of Justice. As a contractarian, he claimed that the principles of justice which form the basic structure of society are ones won through agreement. In his words, they are "the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association." These principles, Rawls argued, are to regulate further agreements and associations. This way of understanding the principles of justice he calls "justice as fairness." Given this, Rawls developed an argument for justice as fairness and a "principle of equality" crucial to his contractarianism.

Rawls rejected traditional contractarian arguments about a primitive state of nature which generates the need for human political association. He developed an argument for what he called the "original position" noting that in "justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in traditional theory of thesocial contract." The original position is not then an actual historical state of affairs and even less a primitative social structure. Rather, it is a hypothetical notion characterized in order to lead to a certain idea of justice. Since it is not a primitive condition or historical reality, the original position can be entered conceptually any time in order to explore the principles of justice.

Rawls depicted the original position as one in which persons are ignorant of social status, differences in ability, fortunes, and even intelligence. Behind this "veil of ignorance," as he calls it, the principles of justice are chosen. Thus "justice as fairness" generates from that hypothetical situation wherein persons are asked to make decisions about what is just ignorant of the impact of these decisions and the possible benefits or cost to them. In such a situation of radical equality, the principles of justice as fairness are chosen. These principles, Rawls argued, are motivated by a "thin theory of good" since all are ignorant of specific character traits, abilities, or needs that would prompt one to argue for certain goods. Behind the "veil" that would be chosen as good are rational life plans and the conditions for self respect. The principles of justice regulate the distribution of these and other primary goods.

In the original position two principles of justice emerge. As Rawls noted, the first "requires equality in assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic injustices … are just only if they result in compensating benefits for every one, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society." Having secured these principles, Rawls then explored institutions. His concern here was with distributive justice within the social good of liberty and the demands for justice as fairness. Given the demand for equality, the goods of society, and especially liberty, had to be distributed fairly. Finally, he explored the good for the political order entailed in justice as fairness. The crucial social good is self respect, and Rawls argued that justice as fairness furthers the equal distribution of the conditions necessary for this good.

In 1993 Rawls published Political Liberalism, based in part on lectures and work published since 1971 but much more than a collection of essays. The book refines and corrects some shortcomings of A Theory of Justice, but beyond that it gives a new focus to the central concerns of the earlier work. Political Liberalism does not depart from the principles put forth in the earlier work, but recasts them in a specifically political context. The question Rawls seeks to answer in this book is not the general one of how social justice can be established, but rather how a free, just and stable political order can be maintained in the present historical and social situation marked by pluralism of religious, philosophical and moral doctrines.

Not only is Rawls' work a seminal one in its own right, but A Theory of Justice also sparked a revival in political philosophy. Political Liberalism in turn generated additional discussion and debate. Given this, the contribution of his thought is difficult to assess. There is little doubt, however, that A Theory of Justice is one of the most important works in philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century. It is also a work that reached beyond the confines of the academy to help influence the reality about which it speaks: the world of our political order.

Further Reading

For helpful works on Rawls, see N. Daniels, Reading Rawls (Oxford, 1975); R.P. Wolff, Understanding Rawls (1977); and John Rawls' Theory of Social Justice, edited by H.G. Blocker and E.H. Smith (1980). □

RAWLS, JOHN BORDLEY

John Bordley Rawls was one of the major moral and political philosophers of the twentieth century. His work embraced liberalism and egalitarianism, while rejecting utilitarianism and more radical political ideas. His most important work, A Theory of Justice (1971), discusses the idea of "justice as fairness."

Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1943 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1950. Rawls was an instructor at Princeton between 1950 and 1952, before attending Oxford University in England as a Fulbright Fellow. Upon his return to the United States in 1953, he served as a professor at Cornell University (1953–59) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960–62).

In 1962, Rawls was appointed professor of philosophy at Harvard University, an institution he served until his retirement in 1991. He continued as a professor emeritus at Harvard, however, in the late 1990s.

Rawls developed his ideas on justice in scholarly articles in the 1950s and 1960s. The

publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the culmination of this work. The book received widespread praise for its application of analytic techniques to the substantive (rather than the methodological) issues in morality.

Rawls's theory of justice is premised on two fundamental principles of justice that, he believed, would guarantee a just and morally acceptable society. The first principle guarantees the right of each person to have the most extensive basic liberty that is compatible with the liberty of others. The second principle states that social and economic positions are to be to everyone's advantage and open to all.

One central concern for Rawls was to show how such principles would be universally adopted. Working from these principles, Rawls developed in detail a simple, but powerful, idea that he called "justice as fairness." This idea proposes that the rules of a group are fair to the extent that a person would agree to be bound by them when ignorant ("the veil of ignorance") of his own possession of characteristics that the rules of the system reward or penalize. In this "original position," a person would not agree to unfair rules because there would be the possibility that he or she would be disadvantaged by them. Thus, the original position forces a person to make moral conclusions and to adopt a generalized point of view in making a social contract.

"Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override."
—John Rawls

Rawls published Political Liberalism in 1993 (updated in 1996), partly in response to criticism of A Theory of Justice. His Collected Papers were published in 1999, as was The Law of Peoples; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. In 2000, his lectures while a professor at Harvard were edited and collected as Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Harvard University Press published more essays the following year as Justice as Fairness, a Restatement. Rawls died on November 24, 2002, at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

further readings

Bullock, Alan, and R.B. Woodings, eds. 1983. 20th Century Culture: A Biographical Companion. New York: Harper & Row.

Kukathas, Chandran, ed. 2003. John Rawls: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers. New York: Routledge.

Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap.

——. 1999. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap.

Talisse, Robert B. 2001. On Rawls. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

cross-references

Jurisprudence; Moral Law.