Biography

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Article abstract: A creative and original thinker, Rawls sought to present the basic political structure of democracy as a set of principles of justice obtained from a hypothetical social contract, a system of cooperation among equal citizens having a common allegiance.

Early Life

In 1921, John Bordley Rawls was born to William Lee Rawls and Anna Abel Stemp Rawls. Rawls was educated at the Kent School, Princeton University, and Cornell University. He served in the United States Army from 1943 until 1946. He married Margaret Warfield Fox in 1949, and they had two sons and two daughters. He was an instructor at Princeton from 1950 until 1952, a Fulbright fellow at Oxford University from 1952 until 1953, and then an assistant and later an associate professor at Cornell from 1953 until 1959. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University from 1959 until 1960, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 until 1962, and the James Bryant Conant University Professor of Moral Philosophy at Harvard University from 1962 until his retirement sometime after 1993.

Life’s Work

Rawls’s primary and most significant work is A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. In this highly controversial volume, Rawls presents a liberal, egalitarian, and moral conception of society and aims to explain and justify the basic structure of a constitutional democracy.

The principal themes of Rawlsian justice have created an enormous literature among many diverse academic disciplines—among them philosophy, political science, economics, and sociology—having in common an interest in liberty, equality, and social justice. Critics of Rawls believe that his foundations are flawed and that his position signals the death of the era of liberalism and the demise of the Enlightenment tradition. After A Theory of Justice appeared, there was an academic shift caused by the critiques of libertarian Robert Nozick and communitarian Michael Sandel.

While acknowledging his indebtedness to the ethics of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Rawls presents his social contract as a public conception of justice. He argues that free persons who are equally situated and ignorant of their historical circumstances would agree to certain principles to secure their equal status and independence and to pursue their conceptions of the good.

In A Theory of Justice , Rawls develops an imagined agreement meant to express terms of fair cooperation among free and equal citizens in a modern constitutional democracy. Rawls’s aim is “to provide the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.” Rawls views persons as free, equal, rational, and endowed with a moral capacity for a sense of justice. Because of differences in knowledge and circumstances, free persons will develop different conceptions of the good. Toward this end, they make conflicting claims on scarce resources. These scarce resources, along with the benefits and burdens resulting from social cooperation, must be divided using some principles of justice. Rawls contends that the appropriate way to decide such principles for a democratic society is by use of conjecture as to what principles free persons would agree to, among themselves, if they were given the opportunity. To ensure that this agreement is fair, they must bring to this task their own awareness of justice as well as historical circumstances, desires, and conceptions of the good. A key concept in Rawls’s theory is the “veil of ignorance.” When deciding the principles to which they would agree, people are assumed to be behind such a veil. They know general social, economic, psychological, and physical theories of all kinds, and they are aware that there are certain all-purpose means that are essential to achieving their good. These “primary social goods” are rights...

(This entire section contains 2060 words.)

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and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, and the basis of self-respect. People in Rawls’s principles-deciding task, however, do not know which social, economic, racial, or other class they will belong to after the principles of justice have been established.

These restrictions render Rawls’s parties strictly equal, enabling him to carry to the limit the intuitive idea of the democratic social contract tradition: that justice is what could, or would, be agreed to among free persons from a position of equality. Rawls views his strong equality condition and other moral conditions as reasonable restrictions on arguments for principles of justice for the basic structure of society. These conditions define the “original position,” the perspective from which rational agents are to agree. Rawls argues that the parties, after being presented with a list of all known conceptions of justice, would unanimously agree to justice as fairness, comprising two principles: (1) Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all; and (2) social and economic inequalities must be attached to offices and positions that are open to all, under conditions of equality of opportunity, and must benefit the least advantaged members of society (the “difference principle”). Included in one’s conception of the good are the religious and philosophical convictions and ethical ways of life that give one’s existence meaning.

The principles of justice are prioritized. The principles chosen from the original position apply to political, social, and economic institutions and the rules that govern them, not to individuals. The principles are concerned with the distribution of “primary goods,” or things that every rational human is presumed to want, whatever that person’s goals, aspirations, and desires. There are two kinds of primary goods: social (income and wealth, opportunities and powers, rights and liberties) and natural (health, intelligence, vigor, imagination, and natural talents affected by social institutions but not directly distributed by them).

According to Rawls’s two principles of justice, the basic liberties of citizens are political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office), the freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, freedom of the person and the right to hold personal property, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure. Rawls does not discuss limitations on these liberties that might be enacted to ensure “equal liberty for all.”

Rawls’s second principle contains a solution called “democratic equality,” that is, equality of fair opportunity supplemented by the principle of efficiency with the difference principle. All in society should benefit, the least well off as well as the advantaged. If entrepreneurs accumulate too much wealth, creating great disparity with the working class, the government is justified in taxing them at a greater rate to pay for benefits for the working class that would reduce the disparity. Such an application of the difference principle greatly constrains the inequalities in the distribution of primary goods that can exist in society. The two principles of justice are meant to express fair terms of cooperation by which equal moral persons would be willing to cooperate with all members of society throughout their whole lives. When the principles are applied, citizens will act with full autonomy.

Many read A Theory of Justice as claiming a methodology for achieving the most rational principles of justice. In subsequent writings, Rawls explained that his more modest aspiration was to set out principles for liberal democracies that would best capture the fundamental idea of “a fair system of cooperation between free and equal persons.” He believes that appropriate principles of justice are ones that are sustained by an overlapping consensus of comprehensive views. Principles of justice can be argued to be valid or desirable or appropriate without reliance on any particular comprehensive view. In a well-ordered society, a plurality of reasonable comprehensive views will support the basic political structures and ideas of justice. One aspect of justice in a liberal democracy will be a principle of common reason, a unifying force among members of society.

Recognizing that certain obscurities existed in A Theory of Justice, Rawls wrote Political Liberalism to clarify problematic aspects of the former work. While continuing to emphasize the importance of the original position, he denies that the original position is designed to set up a choice situation that can be resolved solely through rational decision theory. The work is based substantially on a series of articles that Rawls had already published, albeit in a somewhat different form. Now claiming that his theory is a specifically political theory of justice and not a comprehensive critical moral theory, Rawls regards comprehensive and general moral theories as overlapping on the independently justified political conception of justice.

The first part of the book is a reworking of Rawls’s three Dewey Lectures presented in 1980; in fact, Rawls refers to the main divisions of his book as lectures rather than chapters. The second part of the book consists of three more lectures that weave together various parts of published and unpublished materials on “public reason.” The final part of the book consists of previously published articles, presented as originally published. The one fully new part of the book is an introductory essay.

The most significant feature of his new theory is that Rawls takes the public political culture of a contemporary democratic society from four “model conceptions” or “fundamental ideas”: the idea of the person or citizen, the idea of social cooperation for reciprocal benefit, the idea of the well-ordered society and its basic institutional structure, and the idea of a linking or mediating conception that sets out the standards for discussion and for decision making that citizens could follow in reaching a rational and reasonable decision on the governing principles of political justice. Political Liberalism strengthens and enriches Rawls’s account of how basic liberties and rights are justified and limited.

Influence

Rawls’s theories had a significant impact on American lawyers and judges, having been cited in at least thirty-nine state and federal court opinions as of March, 1994. Rawls’s theories have been included in nearly every American law school course in jurisprudence or legal philosophy dealing with rights, and they have set the agenda of political thinkers and academicians. Finally, Rawls has given philosophers and political scientists perspective and structure through which to accept or criticize his theories. Rawls has caused a reconsideration of the institutions of a constitutional democracy. By breaking with tradition, he caused a rethinking of the concept of justice as fairness and the protection of basic liberties. The philosophical liberal tradition shifted to considerations of communitarianism, emphasizing the group rather than the individual.

Additional Reading

Alejandro, Roberto. The Limits of Rawlsian Justice. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. A new critique of Rawls’s theories.

Barry, Brian. The Liberal Theory of Justice: A Critical Examination of the Principal Doctrines in “A Theory of Justice” by John Rawls. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. An early book-length critique of Rawls.

Baynes, Barry. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, and Habermas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. An attempt to clarify social criticism, including Rawlsian refinements of Kantian arguments. Extensive bibliography.

Boucher, David, and Paul Kelly, eds. The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls. London: Routledge, 1994. An overview of the social contract and its critics. Also contains bibliographical references and an index.

Daniels, Norman, ed. Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice.” Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989. A collection of major critical reactions to A Theory of Justice. Contains a Rawls bibliography covering the years 1971 to 1974.

Griffin, Stephen M., and Lawrence B. Solum, eds. Symposium on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism. Chicago Kent Law Review 69, no. 3 (1994). Contains nine articles by professors of philosophy on the later work of Rawls, with comparisons with the earlier work. A good resource for conflicting views and criticism.

Martin, Rex. Rawls and Rights. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985. Focuses on the basic rights central to Rawls’s theories.

Murphy, Cornelius F., Jr. Descent into Subjectivity: Studies of Rawls, Dworkin, and Unger in the Context of Modern Thought. Wakefield, N.H.: Longwood Academic, 1990. Outlines the antecedents of the social contract tradition (Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant) and places the philosophers under discussion in context, relating them to the earlier philosophical tradition. Written from a legal perspective. Deals with governmental institutions.

Pogge, Thomas W. Realizing Rawls. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. A defense and constructive critique of Rawlsian theories of justice.

Schaefer, David Lewis. Justice or Tyranny? A Critique of John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice.” Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. A critical assessment of Rawls’s work.

Wolff, Robert Paul. Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of “A Theory of Justice.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. A critical assessment of Rawls’s work.

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