John Rawls

Introduction

John Bordley Rawls is the American philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy as a major subfield of analytic philosophy and produced the most influential single work in twentieth-century English-language political theory. Before Rawls, analytic political philosophy had been widely treated as a minor and largely historical subfield; after A Theory of Justice, political philosophy became one of the major active research areas, and the post-Rawlsian literature — in agreement, in extension, and in opposition — has continued to organize contemporary work.

Rawls's career was institutionally distinguished. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard from 1979 until his retirement in 1991. He published comparatively little outside the major works — A Theory of Justice (1971, revised 1999), Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Peoples (1999), and the lectures published as Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000) and Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) — but the influence of the major works has been far-reaching across philosophy, political theory, jurisprudence, and the broader social sciences.

Life

John Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, the second of five sons. The family was educated and well-connected: his father was a prominent tax attorney; his mother was active in the Maryland League of Women Voters. Two of his brothers died in childhood of illnesses contracted from him — traumatic events that Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge takes as formative for the philosopher's sensibility about luck and moral responsibility.

Rawls took his BA at Princeton in 1943 and immediately entered the U.S. Army, serving in the Pacific theater (the Philippines, New Guinea, Japan) until 1945. The wartime experience, including witnessing the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, was formative for his lifelong concerns about justice in war and the moral conditions of postwar political life. He left the Army in 1946 declining a promotion to officer rank in protest at what he took to be an unjustified military action.

Rawls returned to Princeton for graduate work in philosophy, completing the PhD in 1950 with a dissertation on ethical knowledge. He taught at Princeton (1950–52), Cornell (1953–59), MIT (1960–62), and Harvard (1962–2002), where he spent the remainder of his career and where the Conant chair was created for him in 1979.

The two-decade composition of A Theory of Justice is itself a scholarly story. Rawls had been working on the materials since the early 1950s; the early papers (Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics, 1951; Two Concepts of Rules, 1955; Justice as Fairness, 1958; The Sense of Justice, 1963; Distributive Justice, 1967) developed the framework that the 1971 book systematized. The book was widely anticipated within the philosophical community before publication and was immediately recognized as the major event of postwar political philosophy.

Rawls suffered the first of several strokes in the mid-1990s, which limited his subsequent productivity. He died on November 24, 2002, in Lexington, Massachusetts.

The problem he worked on

Rawls's project across his career was the development of a substantive theory of justice for democratic society. The dominant utilitarian framework that had organized English-language ethics and political philosophy through the mid-twentieth century, on Rawls's analysis, could not give a satisfactory account of the priority of liberty, the distinctness of individuals, and the protections that justice demands for the worst-off members of society. The intuitionism of W. D. Ross and the early mid-century analytic ethicists gave the right phenomenology of moral judgment but did not produce a theory that could ground the priorities.

Rawls's response is the theory called justice as fairness. The theory is developed through a thought experiment — the original position under a veil of ignorance — in which rational agents choosing principles to govern their shared social arrangements would converge on two principles: the first principle, guaranteeing equal basic liberties; the second principle, requiring that any social and economic inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. The framework provides substantive content (the two principles) and a method for justifying them (the original position thought experiment) that the prior tradition had not provided.

Contributions

A Theory of Justice

The 1971 A Theory of Justice is Rawls's major work and one of the most influential single books in twentieth-century philosophy. The book is long (about 600 pages), systematic, and rigorously argued; it covers the foundations of the theory, the principles, the institutional applications, and the moral psychology that supports the theory's stability.

The central thought experiment is the original position. Rational agents are asked to choose the principles that will govern their shared social arrangements behind a veil of ignorance — they do not know what position they will occupy in the resulting society (rich or poor, talented or untalented, in the racial majority or minority, of the dominant or marginalized religion). The veil of ignorance is the device that ensures the principles chosen are fair: the agents cannot choose principles that would benefit positions they know they occupy, because they do not know which positions they occupy.

The agents in the original position, Rawls argues, would converge on two principles. The first principle requires that each person have the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with similar liberty for all. The second principle permits social and economic inequalities only if they (a) are attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity and (b) work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle).

The argument is elaborate. The book develops the contractarian framework (drawing on the social contract tradition through Locke, Rousseau, Kant); the conditions of the original position (the rationality of the parties, the veil of ignorance, the primary goods the parties seek); the maximin reasoning by which the parties choose principles that maximize the minimum (the worst-off position); the institutional applications (constitutional structure, economic arrangements, civil disobedience); the moral psychology that supports the stability of the just society.

The book's reception was immediate and substantial. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) gave the major libertarian critique; Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) gave the major communitarian critique; G. A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) gave the major egalitarian critique from within the tradition Rawls had founded. The book has been translated into more than forty languages and remains the most-assigned text in graduate political philosophy.

Political Liberalism

The 1993 Political Liberalism is Rawls's second major work and the major revision of the framework. Rawls had come to see that A Theory of Justice presupposed a comprehensive Kantian moral conception that not all members of a democratic society could be expected to share; the book had not adequately addressed how the principles of justice could be the object of an overlapping consensus among citizens with different comprehensive doctrines (religious, philosophical, moral).

Political Liberalism responds to this problem. The book develops the framework of political (as distinct from comprehensive) liberalism: the principles of justice are presented as a political conception that citizens with different comprehensive doctrines can endorse from within their own doctrines without being required to abandon them. The framework requires the distinction between comprehensive and political conceptions, the doctrine of public reason (the requirement that citizens justify their political positions in terms accessible to those who do not share their comprehensive doctrines), and the doctrine of overlapping consensus (the mode of agreement appropriate to political principles under conditions of reasonable pluralism).

The framework has been continuously generative. The contemporary literature on public reason, on religious participation in democratic politics, on the relation between liberalism and pluralism, and on the foundations of democratic legitimacy all engage Political Liberalism directly.

The Law of Peoples

The 1999 The Law of Peoples extends the Rawlsian framework to international relations. The book develops principles for the regulation of relations among peoples (rather than among individuals), distinguishes the principles applicable among liberal democratic peoples from those applicable in relations with non-liberal peoples that nonetheless qualify as decent (well-ordered hierarchical societies), and addresses the conditions of just war, humanitarian intervention, and the duty of assistance to burdened societies.

The book has been continuously contested. Critics (Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge, Martha Nussbaum) argue that Rawls's framework is insufficiently demanding on the global wealthy; defenders (Samuel Freeman, Catherine Audard) argue that the framework respects the substantive distinction between domestic and international political relations. The contemporary literature on global justice continues to engage The Law of Peoples as the major Rawlsian contribution.

Lectures on moral and political philosophy

The posthumous Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000) and Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) present the lectures Rawls had developed across decades of Harvard teaching on the major figures of the modern moral and political tradition: Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel; Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx. The lectures are pieces of scholarship in their own right and have been widely used as introductions to the figures they treat.

Key works

• A Theory of Justice (1971; revised edition 1999)
• Political Liberalism (1993; expanded edition 1996)
• The Law of Peoples (1999)
• Collected Papers (1999)
• Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000)
• Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)
• Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007)
• A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith (1942 BA thesis, published posthumously 2009)

The Harvard University Press / Belknap Press editions are the standard English texts. The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Freeman, ed., 2003) and the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rawls (Wenar, 2008) anchor the scholarly literature.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Immanuel Kant (the major moral-philosophical influence; the original position is in part a procedural version of the categorical imperative); the social contract tradition through Locke, Rousseau (the contractarian methodology); John Stuart Mill (the utilitarian alternative against which Rawls developed his framework); Augustine (the early theological framework of Rawls's undergraduate thesis); Russell and the analytic tradition (the methodological framework); H. L. A. Hart (the jurisprudential predecessor); Stuart Hampshire (the senior Oxford colleague who shaped the early stages of Rawls's thinking).

Influenced: Almost all subsequent English-language political philosophy. Robert Nozick (whose libertarian critique in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, was the major immediate response); Michael Sandel and the communitarian critics (Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre); G. A. Cohen and the egalitarian critics from within the tradition; Ronald Dworkin (whose work on equality of resources develops Rawlsian themes); Thomas Nagel (Rawls's Harvard colleague); Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and the capabilities approach; the deliberative democracy tradition (Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson); the contemporary cosmopolitan tradition (Thomas Pogge, Charles Beitz); the contemporary critical engagement through Charles Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) and the post-Rawlsian critique of liberal political philosophy.

Reception

Rawls's reception has been continuous and since 1971. A Theory of Justice was immediately recognized as the major event of postwar political philosophy; the subsequent literature has continued to engage the book through the present. The book has been described as the most-cited single work in twentieth-century philosophy.

The institutional impact has been substantial. Almost every major North American philosophy department teaches A Theory of Justice as a foundational text in political philosophy; the framework has shaped constitutional theory (the Rawlsian influence on American constitutional scholarship), economics (the engagement with Rawlsian distributive justice in welfare economics), and the broader social sciences.

Critical reception has come from across the political spectrum. Libertarians (Nozick, James Buchanan) have argued that the difference principle illicitly licenses redistribution; communitarians (Sandel, MacIntyre, Taylor) have argued that the original position presupposes a metaphysics of the unencumbered self that no actual political community could endorse; egalitarians (G. A. Cohen) have argued that the difference principle does not go far enough; feminists (Susan Moller Okin, Iris Marion Young) have argued that the framework inadequately addresses gender and the structures of the family; race theorists (Charles Mills) have argued that the framework abstracts from the racial conditions under which actual democratic societies have developed.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Samuel Freeman's Rawls (2007), the Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Freeman, ed., 2003), Leif Wenar's Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rawls (2008), Paul Weithman's Why Political Liberalism? (2010), Jon Mandle's Rawls's A Theory of Justice: An Introduction (2009), Catherine Audard's John Rawls (2007), and the work of Joshua Cohen, Thomas Pogge, A. John Simmons, and Martha Nussbaum. The journal Philosophy and Public Affairs (founded in 1971, in part as the institutional home for Rawls-influenced work) and the Rawlsian academic infrastructure anchor continuing scholarship. Active debates concern the relation between A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, the contemporary applicability of the original position framework under conditions of climate change and global inequality, the adequacy of Rawls's treatment of race and gender, and the relation between Rawls and post-Rawlsian political philosophy.

Further reading

• Analytic Philosophy — the tradition Rawls operated within
• Kant — the major moral-philosophical influence
• Mill — the utilitarian alternative
• Utilitarianism — the major alternative tradition
• Locke — the social contract predecessor
• Justice — the concept Rawls's work develops

The American philosopher whose A Theory of Justice revived political philosophy as a major analytic subfield and produced the most influential single work in twentieth-century English-language political theory.