John Rawls
John Rawls, an American philosopher, wrote a book of roughly 600 pages that protesters held up in front of government officials at Tiananmen Square in 1989. It was a dense academic treatise called A Theory of Justice. More than 300,000 copies of it have been sold. Scholars from utilitarian, feminist, conservative, libertarian, Catholic, communitarian, Marxist and Green traditions all felt they had to answer it.
How does a slow, exacting argument about the structure of a fair society end up in the hands of demonstrators and under attack from so many rival schools of thought? What did its author ask his readers to imagine, and what did he think a government owes the people it governs? And what kind of life produced such a book?
In 1928, the seven-year-old John Rawls caught diphtheria, and his brother Bobby, younger by 20 months, visited him in his room and was fatally infected. The following winter Rawls caught pneumonia, and another younger brother, Tommy, caught it from him and died. Rawls attributed a stutter to those two deaths. His biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's childhood".
Rawls had been born on the 21st of February 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons. His father, William Lee Rawls, was a prominent attorney in the city. His mother, Anna Abell Stump Rawls, was active in local Democratic politics, including the campaign for women's right to vote.
The Kent School, an Episcopal preparatory school in Connecticut, came next, and he graduated from it in 1939. At Princeton University he joined the Ivy Club and the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. There he fell under the influence of Norman Malcolm, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. During his last two years he became deeply concerned with theology and considered attending a seminary to prepare for the Episcopal priesthood.
His 181-page senior thesis, titled "Meaning of Sin and Faith", attacked Pelagianism because it "would render the Cross of Christ to no effect". Rawls graduated in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.
He enlisted in the US Army in February 1943. He served as an infantryman in the Pacific with the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Infantry Division. A tour in New Guinea earned him a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star. In the Philippines he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed scenes of violence and bloodshed. It was there that he lost his Christian faith and became an atheist.
After Japan surrendered, Rawls joined General MacArthur's occupying army and was promoted to sergeant. The aftermath of the atomic blast at Hiroshima left him disillusioned with the military. He then disobeyed an order to discipline a fellow soldier, "believing no punishment was justified", and was demoted back to private. He left the army in January 1946 and soon returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy.
In 1949, Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox, a Brown University graduate. They had four children: Anne Warfield, Robert Lee, Alexander Emory and Elizabeth Fox.
His Princeton doctorate arrived in 1950, after a dissertation called A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character. The degree also included a year of study at Cornell. He stayed on to teach at Princeton until 1952, when a Fulbright Fellowship took him to Christ Church at Oxford University. There the liberal political theorist and historian Isaiah Berlin and the legal theorist H. L. A. Hart left their mark on him.
In the fall of 1953, Rawls became an assistant professor at Cornell, joining his old mentor Norman Malcolm in the philosophy department. He received tenure three years later. A visiting year at Harvard in 1959-60 was followed by a professorship in the humanities division at MIT in 1960. By 1962 he was back at Harvard as a professor of philosophy, and he remained there until mandatory retirement in 1991. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship.
Harvard gave him a remarkable roster of students. Thomas Nagel, Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, T. M. Scanlon, Susan Neiman, Elizabeth S. Anderson and Barbara Herman all trained under him. So did Thomas Pogge, who would later become his biographer.
In 1968, Milton Friedman put Rawls forward for membership in the Mont Pèlerin Society. Rawls withdrew three years later, just before A Theory of Justice was published.
The book published in 1971 begins with a request. Rawls asks readers to join a hypothetical group, which he called the original position, whose task is to choose the political and economic structure of a society they will then live in. Each member deliberates behind what he named a veil of ignorance. Nobody knows their gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, religion or disability status.
The members know only that they have the basic capacities needed to take part in a lasting system of mutual cooperation. The first is the capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good, or life plan. Whether that plan is religious or secular, they cannot tell. The second is the capacity to develop a sense of justice and an effective desire to act on it. Each person seeks their own maximum advantage.
That self-interest produces fair results. A proposal that women or black people should be barred from public office would never be made, because it would be irrational. Any proposer might turn out to be a woman or a black person. By the same logic, rational choosers refuse to gamble on being the one who lands at the bottom of the society they design.
Rawls wanted to show that the conflict between freedom and equality is illusory. He called the unified result justice as fairness. The original position serves that aim by filtering out features such as hair color, eye color, height and race. These are traits we already regard as irrelevant when we think about what a just arrangement between people means.
The device has ancestors. Rawls modeled it, in certain respects, on the initial situations of social contract thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Each of those thinkers built the starting point differently, to generate a different political morality. Iain King has suggested another source: Rawls's time in post-war Japan. The Allied Occupation authorities there had to design new social and political arrangements while "imagining away all that had gone before".
Rawls named his method "reflective equilibrium". One reaches it by adjusting general principles and judgments about particular cases against each other until they agree. The concept has since been borrowed by other areas of philosophy.
The Liberty Principle comes first among the two principles Rawls drew from the original position. It guarantees equal basic liberties for all citizens: freedom of conscience, association and expression, along with democratic rights. Rawls also includes a personal property right. He defends it by appeal to moral capacities and self-respect, not to a natural right of self-ownership. That choice separates him from the classical liberalism of John Locke and the libertarianism of Robert Nozick.
A second principle follows, because formal liberties can be hollow. Guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real worth to the desperately poor and marginalized. Yet demanding that everyone have identical effective opportunities would almost certainly trample the very liberties being equalized. So Rawls settled on securing the "fair worth" of liberty. Wherever a person ends up, life should be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals.
The second principle therefore has two parts. Fair Equality of Opportunity means that people with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances. The difference principle permits inequalities only when they work to the benefit of the least advantaged.
Rawls held that these principles govern the "basic structure" of society: the judiciary, the economic structure and the political constitution. That restriction has drawn controversy and constructive debate, notably in the work of Gerald Cohen. Relational approaches to justice, by contrast, look at how connections between individuals are established and configured.
He also ordered the principles "lexically", giving basic liberties priority over the more egalitarian demands of the second principle. Philosophers still argue about that ranking.
Finally, Rawls aimed his theory at what he called a "well-ordered society", one "designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice". He saw justice as fairness as a contribution to "ideal theory", the search for principles suited to such a society "under favorable circumstances".
A worry about his own foundations drove Rawls to write Political Liberalism, published in 1993. His defense of justice as fairness leaned on a Kantian view of the good life, one that citizens could reasonably reject. If a state is justified only by a controversial vision of human flourishing, it is unclear how that state could be legitimate. Rawls insisted that disagreement among citizens about religion, morality and philosophy is itself reasonable, because free inquiry and free conscience produce it.
His answer was the "ideal of public reason". In their public capacity, citizens should address one another only with reasons whose status as reasons is shared between them. A Supreme Court justice deciding whether denying marriage to same-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment may not rest the decision on religious conviction. Reasons drawn from interpreting sacred text depend on faith commitments that can be reasonably rejected.
Rawls called the duty to offer such reasons the duty of civility. It applies across what he named the "public political forum". That forum runs from the highest legislative and judicial bodies down to a single citizen deciding how to vote in a state referendum. Campaigning politicians, he believed, should likewise avoid pandering to the religious or moral convictions of their constituents.
Public reason leaves a gap, since the political values of freedom, equality and fairness still need justifying. Rawls assigned that task to private citizens and their "reasonable comprehensive doctrines". A reasonable Catholic will justify liberal values one way, a reasonable Muslim another, and a reasonable secular citizen a third. Picture a Venn diagram in which the doctrines overlap. The shared space is what he called an "overlapping consensus".
Doctrines that reject the duty of civility fall outside that space. On what to say to them, Rawls's answer was essentially nothing. His project asked whether liberal political legitimacy is internally coherent among people already committed or open to liberal values. Justifying it to everyone else was not its job.
The book also reworded his principles of justice. The first now grants an "equal claim" instead of an "equal right", and "a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties" replaces "system of basic liberties". The two halves of the second principle swapped places, so the difference principle now comes last of the three.
A Theory of Justice contained only passing remarks on international affairs. Late in his career, Rawls built a full theory of global politics in The Law of Peoples. Its basic move was to speak of a society of peoples rather than the usual picture of relations between states.
He described well-ordered peoples as either "liberal" or "decent". Decent peoples might have a state religion, deny members of minority faiths the right to hold positions of power, or organize political participation through consultation hierarchies instead of elections. Even so, a liberal international order must tolerate them. The condition was that no well-ordered people may violate human rights or behave aggressively.
Peoples that fail those tests are labeled 'outlaw states', 'societies burdened by unfavorable conditions' or 'benevolent absolutisms', depending on their failing. They do not enjoy the mutual respect and toleration owed to liberal and decent peoples.
Many fellow egalitarian liberals were surprised by what he said about wealth across borders. Charles Beitz had already argued that Rawls's Difference Principle should apply globally. Rawls refused, partly because a world state does not exist and would not be stable. Critics have replied that systems of global governance, the Bretton Woods system among them, already distribute primary social goods between people. On that view, a cosmopolitan reading of justice as fairness would be the better choice.
Rawls saw nation states, unlike citizens, as self-sufficient in the cooperative enterprises that make up domestic societies. Aid should go to governments unable to protect human rights for economic reasons. Its purpose was to help them sustain liberal or decent institutions, not to reach global equality. Aid without end, he argued, would make industrious populations subsidize idle ones. It would also create a moral hazard, since governments could spend recklessly knowing others would bail them out.
His "non-ideal" theory condemned the bombing of civilians, including the American bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II. It also took up immigration and nuclear proliferation, and it sketched the ideal of the statesman. That is a leader who looks to the next generation and promotes international harmony despite domestic pressure to do otherwise.
Rawls controversially held that human rights violations can legitimize military intervention. He still hoped that such societies could be coaxed into peaceful reform by the example of liberal and decent peoples.
When Bill Clinton presented Rawls with the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the citation said his works "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one". Rawls also received the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy that year.
Nine years earlier, Will Kymlicka had written in an introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Courts in the United States and Canada frequently cite Rawls, and politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom refer to him. A 2008 national survey drew 1,086 responses from professors at American colleges and universities. Rawls topped its list of scholars with the greatest impact on political theory in the previous 20 years.
The criticism has been as vigorous as the praise. Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer questioned the universalist basis of the original position, stressing the cultural and social roots of political principles. Although their objections are usually called communitarian, none of the four identified with philosophical communitarianism. Rawls later tried to reconcile his theory with the possibility that its foundations might not apply universally.
Others built on him. In the 1980s, G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer drew extensively on Rawls to launch the movement known as Analytical Marxism. Jürgen Habermas debated him, and Habermas's reading led the Frankfurt School to take Rawls and other analytical philosophers seriously. Rainer Forst was advised by both men. Eva Kittay extended Rawls's work to the concerns of women and cognitively disabled people.
Rawls's doubt that talents can justify moral desert, whether developed or inherited, unsettled many on the political left. It fed ideas such as luck egalitarianism and unconditional basic income, which have drawn criticism of their own. Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice (2009), praised Rawls for reviving interest in justice but argued that abstract ideal scenarios distract from fixing real injustice. In Free and Equal (2023), Daniel Chandler argued that Rawls had been overlooked in mainstream political debate. He blamed Rawls's reclusive personality, the abstraction of his work and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.
The man himself rarely gave interviews. He had what was described as a "bat-like horror of the limelight", and he never became a public intellectual despite his fame. In 1995 he suffered the first of several strokes, which severely limited his work. He still completed The Law of Peoples. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, a response to criticisms of his first book, appeared in 2001. Rawls died of heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on the 24th of November 2002, aged 81. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Honors had accumulated over the years, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in 1972 and the American Philosophical Society in 1974. The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters admitted him in 1992. Asteroid 16561 Rawls carries his name. His ideas have even reached the stage: A Theory of Justice: The Musical, with Rawls as its protagonist, premiered at Oxford in 2013 and was later revived for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
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Common questions
What is the original position?
It is a thought experiment in which people choose the rules of a society without knowing their own gender, race, age, wealth, skills, religion or disability status. Rawls used it to argue for fair principles of justice.
What are Rawls's two principles of justice?
The first guarantees equal basic liberties for all citizens. The second requires fair equality of opportunity and permits inequalities only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society.
What is an overlapping consensus?
It is the shared political ground on which many reasonable religious, moral and secular doctrines agree, even though each justifies liberal values in its own way.
Which are Rawls's three main books?
They are A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples, which deals with global justice.
Did Rawls think wealth should be redistributed across the whole world?
No. He denied that his difference principle applies globally, partly because a world state does not exist and would not be stable. He supported aid to help societies sustain liberal or decent institutions.
All sources
62 references cited across the entry
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- 3NewsJohn Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82 correctedDouglas Martin — November 26, 2002
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- 5'Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Argument' by Catherine H. Zuckert (Ed.)Thad Williamson — Cambridge University Press — 2012
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- 9Fair Opportunity to ParticipateThe Canadian Political Science Review — June 2009
- 10JournalPolitical Theory Today: Results of a National SurveyMatthew J. Moore — 2009
- 12NewsObituary: John RawlsBen Rogers — November 27, 2002
- 13Freeman, 2010:xix
- 15BookJohn RawlsLeif Wenar — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — January 1, 2013
- 16ThesisA Brief Inquiry Into The Meaning of Sin and FaithJohn Bordley Rawls — Princeton University — 1942
- 18John Rawls: Theorist of Modern LiberalismThe Heritage Foundation — August 13, 2014
- 19BookChurch, State and Public Justice: Five ViewsRonald J. Sider et al. — InterVarsity Press — 2009
- 20John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82Douglas Martin — 2002-11-26
- 21BookThe Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market TurnAvner Offer et al. — Princeton University Press — 2016
- 22BookFrontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membershipMartha Craven Nussbaum — Belknap Press — 2007
- 23BookAnarchy, State, and UtopiaRobert Nozick
- 26Rawls, John. "The idea of public reason revisited", The University of Chicago Law Review 64.3 (1997): 765-807.
- 28ThesisApplying Rawls in a Globalizing WorldPaul Pols — University of Utrecht — 2010
- 30NewsJohn RawlsChristine Korsgaard et al. — May 19, 2005
- 31More Than Just a Theory | Quest Research MagazineApril 2, 2013
- 33John RawlsBen Rogers — June 1999
- 34JournalWhat is the Point of Equality?Elizabeth S. Anderson — January 1999
- 35JournalWhy Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic IncomePhilippe Van Parijs — 1991
- 37JournalEquality of What? On Welfare, Goods and CapabilitiesG.A. Cohen — 1990
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- 39BookGiants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990Bloom, Allan — Simon & Schuster — 1991
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- 41BookThe Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyMetaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2020
- 44BookContexts of JusticeRainer Forst et al. — University of California Press — 2002
- 45Feminist Political PhilosophyNoëlle McAfee et al. — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2022
- 46BookThe Idea of JusticeAmartya Sen — Belknap Press (Harvard University Press) — 2009
- 47BookFree and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like?Daniel Chandler — Allen Lane — 2023
- 48John Rawls, influential political philosopher, dead at 81Ken Gewertz — 2002-11-25
- 49John Rawls's religionNathan Schneider — 2009-03-31
- 50JournalWhen Rawls Met JesusHilary Bok — Fall 2009
- 51John Rawls' "On Religion"David Walsh — 2018-08-12
- 52MagazineReligious Faith and John RawlsKwame Anthony Appiah — 2010-12-09
- 53Page 12 of John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice by Thomas Pogge, 2007.
- 56Utenlandske medlemmerNorwegian Academy of Science and Letters
- 57Oxford / News / Colleges / PPE finalists create revision musicalCherwell.org — October 3, 2012
- 58BookJohn Rawls: An IntroductionPercy B. Lehning — Cambridge University Press — 2009
- 59ThesisApplying Rawls in a Globalizing WorldPaul Pols — University of Utrecht — 2010
- 60BookA Theory of JusticeJohn Rawls — Belknap Press of Harvard University Press — 1971
- 61BookJustice as Fairness: A RestatementJohn Rawls — Harvard University Press — 2001
- 62Will WilkinsonSage; Cato Institute — 2008