Rawls, John (1921–2002)

John Rawls, an American political philosopher, was, and remains, the leading figure shaping the framework [Page 1201]of Anglo-American academic political and legal theory.

Rawls received his undergraduate and graduate education at Princeton University. He taught for brief periods there, at Oxford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell. Most of his career was spent at Harvard University. Some of his students have pursued noteworthy academic careers in moral and political philosophy; they include Christine Korsgaard, Joshua Cohen, Barbara Herman, and Onora O'Neill. He was widely respected by his students as a great mentor.

Rawls's most significant work was his first book, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. This work (and the series of journal articles leading up to it) single-handedly revived the social contract tradition of political thought. Twentieth-century academic political theory had previously been dominated by utilitarian approaches, strongly shaped by economics, and systems theoretic approaches, strongly shaped by sociology and administrative theory.

Rawls introduces A Theory of Justice and, by extension, the entirety of his philosophical project with the idea that justice is the first virtue of a social institution, just as truth is of systems of thought. His goal is to characterize this justice, restricted to the basic structure of society, the way that society's major institutions—its constitution and highest-level economic and social arrangements—distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation. The way one should do political philosophy is to seek reflective equilibrium. This involves comparing the results of one's theories to one's commonsense moral intuitions, adjusting one or the other as seems appropriate, until harmony is achieved between the two.

The original position serves for Rawls as a mechanism for the framing and ratification of principles of justice, his version of the social contract. This original position is hypothetical, a thought experiment allowing one to understand how principles of justice that answer the demands of justice as fairness would be chosen. An important feature of this original position is the veil of ignorance, a device that operationalizes Rawls's conception of fairness by insuring that those placed in the original position do not know what social, economic, racial, sexual, and other specific circumstances they would find themselves in after they emerge from behind the veil. Rawls further assumes that those in the original position are risk-averse. They assume they could end up in the worst possible position in the resulting society and choose principles so that that the worst position is as good as it could possibly be.

The two principles of justice receive their fullest statement as follows:

• 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 benefit of the least advantaged,
  • b.
    consistent with the just savings principle, and
  • c.
    attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of the equality of opportunity.

Debate over A Theory of Justice has centered on two of its features. The first is the character of the original position, particularly the abstract, calculative nature of the reasoning involved and its individualism. The second is the interpretation and elaboration of part a of the second principle. This part is called the difference principle. Despite the intense attention given to A Theory of Justice, some aspects have not been well examined. For example, Rawls outlines a moral psychology, in which people are presumed to pursue rational life-plans. He derives an account of primary goods from this, those basic goods that are essential for pursuing one's life-plan, whatever it may be. They include liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and, above all, self-respect. Ideally, these serve life-plans governed by the Aristotelian principle, where one seeks increasingly complex ways to exercise one's interests and skills.

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