John Bordley Rawls

John Bordley Rawls 1921-2002, American philosopher and political theorist, b. Baltimore, grad. Princeton (A.B., 1943; Ph.D., 1950). He taught at Princeton (1950-52), Cornell (1953-59), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960-62) before becoming (1962) professor of philosophy at Harvard. Rawls's chief work was A Theory of Justice (1971, 2d ed. 1999), in which he attempted, within the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, to offer an alternative to utilitarian political philosophy (see utilitarianism ). His system was developed from two basic principles: Each person has a right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with like liberty for others, and inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power are just only when they can be reasonably expected to work to the advantage of those who are worst off. For Rawls, justice does not require equality in social position, but it does require that people share one another's fate.

Providing the social contract tradition with a formidable philosophic defense by balancing the claims of liberty and equality, Rawls's book revived interest in systematic political theory. His other works include The Law of Peoples (1999) and Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000). He restated and enlarged the arguments of his 1971 magnum opus, replying to his critics and correcting what he perceived as mistakes in the original work while aiming at a broader audience, in his Justice as Fairness (2001). Rawls's liberalism has often been compared to the conservatism of his fellow Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozick .

Bibliography: See studies by B. M. Barry (1973), R. P. Wolff (1977), D. L. Schaefer (1979), A. Pampapathy Rao (1979, 1981, and 1998), R. Martin (1985), T. W. Pogge (1989), C. Kukathas and P. Pettit (1990), J. A. Corlett, ed. (1991), R. Alejandro (1998), D. A. Dombrowski (2001), and R. B. Talisse (2001).

Rawls, John (1921–2002), moral and political philosopher.Born in Baltimore, John Bordley Rawls attended Princeton, served in the Pacific in World War II, and received his Princeton Ph.D. in 1950 for a dissertation entitled A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge. He taught briefly at Princeton, Cornell, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and for thirty years at Harvard, training many leading philosophers in ethics and political philosophy.

Rawls's major work, A Theory of Justice (1971), used a hypothetical social contract (the “Original Position”) to argue for an alternative to the utilitarianism that dominated Anglo‐American philosophy. Deliberating behind a “veil of ignorance” that blinds them to distinguishing and potentially biasing facts about themselves, contractors in Rawls's hypothetical scenario choose principles that protect certain basic liberties, guarantee fair equality of opportunity, and permit inequalities (measured by an index of primary social goods) only if the inequalities work to make those who are worst off as well off as possible. These principles, he argued, match our considered moral judgments in “reflective equilibrium” better than utilitarianism and produce a system that is more stable. Rawls revised his account of stability and political justification in Political Liberalism (1993) to address the pluralism of comprehensive moral views that arise in free nation states.

Rawls's work became the dominant influence in discussions of liberalism and democratic theory in the last quarter of the century, influencing such fields as jurisprudence, economics, and political science. Its focus on substantive issues rather than on questions about the “language” of moral discourse also contributed to a broad resurgence in applied ethics.

Bibliography

Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of A Theory of Justice, 1975.
Symposium on Rawlsian Theory of Justice: Recent Developments, Ethics 99 (1989).
Samuel Freeman, ed., Companion to Rawls, 2001.

Norman Daniels