Rawls, John (1921–2002)

REGARDED AS ONE OF the most important social philosophers of the 20th century, John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended the Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Princeton University in 1943. Serving in the U.S. infantry from 1943 to 1945, he had tours in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. He returned to the United States in 1946 to attend graduate school at Princeton, receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1950.

He taught at his alma mater for two years before accepting a teaching position at Cornell University. He was an assistant and associate professor there from 1953 to 1959, then was professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 1962. He joined the Harvard Philosophy Department in 1962. His 1971 groundbreaking work, A Theory of Justice, was nominated for a National Book Award. He was appointed the Conant University Professor at Harvard in 1979, allowing him the freedom to more fully develop his ideas on social justice and fairness.

He responded with a number of other important works, including Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), Collected Papers (1999), Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). Rawls received the National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999. He suffered the first of several debilitating strokes in 1995, but continued to work out his ideas until his death from heart failure in his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Rawls used A Theory of Justice to refine the theory of the social contract forged by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. Individuals in their “original position,” or natural state, most social philosophers argued, created a social contract. (It should be noted that these ideas were theoretical rather than historical in nature.) This contract defined the rights and obligations of all members of a given community or society. While some argued that the strongest and most talented in such a society would fare better than those who were weaker or less fortunate, Rawls's thoughts on the social contract were predicated on a “veil of ignorance”—that is, the representatives in this social contract should design laws without specific knowledge about their constituents' intelligence, wealth, or other factors. This, he argued, was the best way to ensure true fairness.

These representatives would also desire justice, and would use two guiding principles (which he collectively called “justice as fairness”): liberty and difference. The liberty principle would provide all citizens with a satisfactory number of basic rights—as many as the society could allow. While different rights might be added or subtracted for the purpose of gaining the most satisfactory collection of rights, this principle was absolute and could not be violated. The difference principle would study all of society's inherent inequalities and design laws or systems that benefit the least powerful social group.

Some inequalities, such as differences in pay, were still beneficial for society, so long as the skills of the better paid, such as doctors and lawyers, were available to all. Rawls also developed the idea of the “maximin” (or maximizing the minimum). A theoretical example of the application of Rawls's ideas might be found in a so-ciety's contemplation of the institution of slavery based on race. Ignorant of the race of one's family or friends (veil of ignorance), desiring to protect basic liberties (liberty principle), and working to defend the rights of any marginalized race (difference principle), the idea would be soundly rejected. Any rational person would avoid living in a society where s/he might be enslaved, and would seek out one where s/he would be most free. Rawls's later works refined his concepts of justice, considered the long-term viability of the system he advocated, and addressed his critics.

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