Rawls, John

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Rawls, John 1921-2002

John Rawls was one of the leading political philosophers of the twentieth century. His magisterial work, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971. That book was deeply influenced by philosophers in the social contract tradition, including John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially Immanuel Kant. A Theory of Justice stands with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s Second Treatise as a classic statement of the contract view. In Rawls’s later work, epitomized in his book Political Liberalism, he rethought and clarified some of his earlier positions and made explicit a highly original philosophical methodology. In his last book, The Law of Peoples, Rawls used the social contract to approach problems of international justice.

John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921. He received his BA in philosophy from Princeton in January 1943. He entered the army shortly after graduating from college and saw combat in the Pacific theater during World War II. After his discharge from the military, Rawls returned to Princeton, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1949. In that year, he also married Margaret Fox, to whom he remained married until his death. Rawls spent 1950-1952 as an instructor at Princeton and 1952-1953 on a Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford. Upon his return to the United States, Rawls joined the philosophy department at Cornell. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 and to Harvard in 1962. Rawls remained a member of the Harvard faculty until he retired in 1991. He taught and published in retirement until ill health made it impossible for him to continue working. He died on November 24, 2002.

Rawls took the central problem of contemporary political philosophy to be that of framing a conception of justice that would be appropriate for liberal democracies existing under modern conditions. At the heart of a conception of justice, Rawls thought, are norms for distributing the “primary goods” generated by social cooperation and distributed by society’s “basic structure.” These goods are rights, liberties, income, wealth, opportunity, and the social bases of self-respect. The basic structure is the set of a society’s most important economic, legal, and political institutions. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defended two principles of justice governing the basic structure’s distribution of these goods: (1) Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. (2) Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest expected benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Rawls defended these principles by arguing that they are the solution to an important choice problem. More specifically, he argued that they would be adopted in a version of the social contract that he called “the original position.” In the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, the contract is arrived at in “the state of nature.” Both Hobbes and Locke imagine this state to be one in which there is no government and in which human beings have God-given authority over themselves, but in which they also know that living under a common human authority would be advantageous. The choice problem confronting parties in the state of nature, according to Hobbes and Locke, is that of determining what form that authority should assume. Hobbes famously argued that parties faced with this problem would choose to delegate their powers to an absolute sovereign, while Locke defended limited sovereignty. In the original position, parties do not choose a form of government. Instead, they choose principles of justice to regulate their society. They choose from a menu of principles by asking which ones would guarantee them the greatest stock of primary goods if basic institutions conformed to them.

In the states of nature described by Hobbes and Locke, parties are free and are roughly equal in power. Despite their equality, they have information about themselves and their situation that they could, in principle, use to their advantage. In Locke’s theory, for example, parties could know the extent of their property holdings, since Locke held that property rights are established before agreement on the terms of the social contract is reached. Differences in the parties’ holdings could give some an advantage over others, and so parties’ knowledge of differences in their holdings could affect the outcome of the contract.

According to Rawls’s description of the original position, parties in it are deprived of all information about themselves and of all but the most general information about society. Given these restrictions on information, Rawls argued that it would be rational for parties in the original position to decide on principles using the maximin rule of rational choice. This rule enjoins choosers to select the option that guarantees the best worst outcome. Applied to the original position, maximin enjoins parties to maximize the stock of primary goods they would enjoy if they were in the worst-off social position. Rawls argued that parties choosing in the original position, using maximin, would adopt his two principles. The first principle guarantees equal liberty. The second clearly imposes a strong restriction on economic inequality and requires that all have equal opportunities to secure positions of advantage. Equality of opportunity, in turn, requires far more than the absence of legal barriers to such positions. Rawls believed that social and economic class of origin should not affect life prospects. Fair equality of opportunity therefore requires systems of education and training sufficient to ensure that developed talents are widely dispersed. Equal liberty has long been a part of the liberal tradition. Part of Rawls’s own pioneering contribution was to show the resources of the social contract tradition could be deployed to defend equality of opportunity and highly economic egalitarianism as well.

The lack of information available in the original position, effected by what Rawls called “the veil of ignorance,” struck many rational choice theorists as an implausible stipulation. Rawls defended the informational constraints by arguing that the veil of ignorance merely makes vivid a condition we intuitively recognize as a plausible one to impose on our own reasoning about justice: Our thinking about what is right should not, we think, be distorted by information about what is to our own advantage. The veil of ignorance guarantees that the parties’ reasoning about justice will not be distorted in this way. Because parties in the original position are free, equal, and unbiased, Rawls argued, they are situated fairly. Because they are situated fairly, he concluded, the principles they would choose are fair. Rawls therefore called his conception of justice “justice as fairness.”

Modern liberal democracies exist under conditions of religious and philosophical pluralism. In Political Liberalism and other later work, Rawls argued that justice as fairness could secure agreement about basic justice among citizens of democracies in these conditions. It could do so because justice as fairness does not begin with metaphysical theses about the human person or the human good that are drawn from any one religious or philosophical view. Rather, it begins with ideas about the person, about political argument, and about social cooperation that are implicit in the public culture of democratic societies. For example, Rawls argued that the conditions of the original position “represent” fundamental elements of human moral personality. Rawls’s argument that political philosophy should begin with ideas latent in public culture seemed to some philosophers to introduce a highly questionable method into political theorizing. But, Rawls countered, liberal thinkers in the early modern period sought a basis for political agreement that could be shared by citizens of diverse religions. To claim that political philosophy should not presuppose the truth of a contentious metaphysical theory is to do no more, he maintained, than to extend their principle of toleration from religion to philosophy itself. Because the principle of religious toleration is so much a part of the liberal tradition, Rawls’s imaginative extension of the principle of toleration—like his defense of economic egalitarianism and fair equality of opportunity—counts as an important part of his enduring bequest to that tradition.

SEE ALSO Democracy; Hobbes, Thomas; Justice; Justice, Distributive; Locke, John; Maximin Principle; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Social Contract; State of Nature