John Rawls

American philosopher

• Born: February 21, 1921
• Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: November 24, 2002
• Place of death: Lexington, Massachusetts

Often considered the most significant political philosopher of the twentieth century and one of its most important moral philosophers as well, Rawls is widely recognized as one of the century’s leading proponents of liberalism.

Early Life

John Rawls (rawlz) grew up in comfortable circumstances as the son of a Baltimore tax attorney. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1943 and served the last two years of World War II as a soldier in the Pacific. He returned to Princeton for graduate study in philosophy, married in 1949, and was awarded his doctorate in 1950. He spent his half-century academic career at Princeton, Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard.

Two events from Rawls’s early life have been cited as having special significance for his later philosophical work: the loss of two younger brothers to diseases (diphtheria and pneumonia), which they had contracted from Rawls; and the bombing of Hiroshima, which arguably saved the lives of many U.S. soldiers fighting in the Pacific, including Rawls. Both events seem to have produced feelings of guilt about his undeserved good fortune and have been considered possible sources of Rawls’s concern with the unfairness of life’s contingencies. These experiences also most likely influenced the development of his vision of justice as involving an absolute commitment to rectify the arbitrariness of natural fortune.

Life’s Work

To a greater extent than is common even among academics, Rawls devoted his life to the development of a single complex scholarly project: the analysis (and, in a sense, defense) of the philosophical implications of the political idea of liberal democracy. His intensive and repeatedly revised studies on the subject have exerted vast academic influence on the substance and methods of moral and political philosophy and on allied forms of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. That he has had, or will have, lasting influence on the actual course of law or politics outside academic circles is sometimes asserted, and sometimes disputed.

Despite the regnant emotivism of the postwar years, Rawls sought an acceptable decision procedure for ethics, and in many ways his later work is a refinement of that early project. Lacking an external foundation for moral philosophy, his methodology emphasizes balancing concrete intuitions and theoretical requirements in what he came to call, with his gift for philosophical phrase-making, “reflective equilibrium.”

The major statement of the first phase of his work was A Theory of Justice , an instant classic when published in 1971. Rawls borrowed from (and enriched) social contract theory, arguing that choices of principle concerning the basic structure of society should be regarded as if made by contractors in an “original position,” choosing from behind a “veil of ignorance” concerning their special characteristics and interests. He borrowed from the deontological moral theory of Immanuel Kant to attack utilitarian moral theory for failing to take seriously the difference between one person and another. He defended the “priority of liberty” to other values but urged the need to overcome the arbitrary effects of the “natural lottery” by allocating the benefits of social cooperation in accordance with a “difference principle” that would allow social arrangements only if they improve the condition of those who are worst off.

Theory, as Rawls came to refer to his first book, dominated its era. His Harvard colleague Robert Nozick who offered a libertarian alternative to Rawls in his National Book Award-winning Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), immediately conceded that Rawls had set the terms of the debate about justice, though he argued for the superiority of historical principles of justice to “end-result principles” such as those of Rawls. Two decades later, Amartya Sen , a Nobel Prize-winning economist, opined in Inequality Reexamined (1992) that “it would be difficult to try to construct a theory of justice today that would not have been powerfully influenced by . . . Rawls’s deep and penetrating analysis,” though he defended his own “capabilities” approach. A decade and a half later, distinguished public intellectual and philosopher Martha Nussbaum focused her Frontiers of Justice (2006) on Rawls’s theory “because it is the strongest political theory in the social contract tradition that we have, and, indeed, one of the most distinguished theories in the Western tradition of political philosophy.”

Theory was criticized from all sides. Rawls responded to many criticisms and revised his views in light of some, but in time he came to feel that the book was deeply flawed. He gradually retreated from the characterization of his work as metaphysical, or even moral, and increasingly emphasized its purely political character. But he nonetheless insisted that a mere mutual accommodation of conflicting interests a modus vivendi, a way of getting along with one another was not enough in politics. It was important that individual citizens, with their incompatible “comprehensive doctrines” about life, find an “overlapping consensus” of fundamental political principles whereby they could agree to disagree, while recognizing that what they can agree about which would amount to public reason is the real basis for political cooperation. In following this theoretical path, he broadened the question of justice into the question of legitimacy: Under what circumstances is it fair to use the state’s coercive power on those who reasonably disagree with us?

This approach is defended in Rawls’s second book, Political Liberalism (1993), and in a number of satellite essays that provide clarifications and revisions of his views. In 1999, Rawls offered a revised edition of Theory as well as a treatment of international law in The Law of Peoples. In 2001 he published a restatement of his position, Justice as Fairness . Slowed down by strokes in 1995 and after, he nonetheless continued to publish until his death. U.S. president Bill Clinton presented him with the National Humanities Medal in 1999 for his contributions to the understanding of democracy.

Significance

Rawls is regarded by his many supporters to have revitalized political philosophy at a time when that philosophy was thought (within the analytic philosophy mainstream) to be impossible, meaningless, or trivial. His work shows how political (if not moral) reflection can occur independent of reservations about meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics. Rawls also reinvigorated nonutilitarian moral theory, and thus he encouraged the turn, beginning in the 1970’s, away from abstract metatheoretical reflection toward substantive theoretical debate.

To his devotees, Rawls’s ideas will last for centuries and influence economics, politics, law, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. To his severest critics, however, his baleful influence was largely confined to the leftish liberal camp of universities for whose presumptions it provided theoretical cover and may already be waning even there. Those hostile to Rawls’s work regard it as dressing up the contentious intuitions of liberalism as the deliverances of reason, or as distorting the genuine liberalism of earlier eras with the so-called political correctness of the New Left.

More than many theorists, Rawls tried to make a place for fundamental religious and moral disagreement in political life, but in doing so insisted that it be put in its place rather than claim hegemony. In relegating disagreements over such values to private life, in contrast with a minimalist public reason, Rawls’s approach demonstrates its liberal character.

Bibliography

Anderson, Brian C. “The Antipolitical Philosophy of John Rawls.” Public Interest, Spring, 2003, 39-51. Argues that Rawls’s work abstracts too much from the complex texture of actual human psychology and therefore provides an unsatisfactory basis for political theorizing.

Freeman, Samuel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This volume, edited by a prominent exponent of Rawls’s views, contains fifteen valuable essays by distinguished philosophers, along with a thirty-six-page bibliography.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Influential libertarian treatise, which includes (chapter 7) a detailed critique of Rawls’s Theory.

Rawls, John. Collected Papers. Edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. This large collection contains most of Rawls’s published essays and is important in studying the development of his views.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Edited by Erin Kelley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. A later, shorter restatement (and revision) of Rawls’s basic ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. The paperback edition, published in 1996, adds important new material. This volume extends and significantly revises Rawls’s project and is viewed by some as even more important than Theory.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. A significantly revised edition was published in 1999, but the original edition was reissued in 2005. Generally considered Rawls’s magnum opus.

Richardson, Henry, and Paul Weithman, eds. The Philosophy of Rawls. New York: Garland, 1999. Five volumes that include some of the best of the thousands of essays written about Rawls. The first volume opens with Thomas W. Pogge’s biographical essay, “A Brief Sketch of Rawls’s Life.”

Rogers, Ben. “Portrait: John Rawls.” Prospect 42 (June, 1999): 50-55. One of the few biographically revealing portraits of the notoriously reclusive Rawls.

Schaefer, David Lewis. Illiberal Justice: John Rawls Versus the American Political Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Condemns Rawls’s ideas as inadequate both as philosophy and as politics and considers his influence a dangerous distortion of traditional American liberalism.