John Rawls

Biography

Early life and education

Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons. His father, William Lee Rawls, was a prominent Baltimore attorney, and his mother, Anna Abell Stump Rawls, was active in local Democratic politics, including advocacy for women's voting rights. Tragedy struck Rawls at a young age:

Two of his brothers died in childhood because they had contracted fatal illnesses from him. ... In 1928, the seven-year-old Rawls contracted diphtheria. His brother Bobby, younger by 20 months, visited him in his room and was fatally infected. The next winter, Rawls contracted pneumonia. Another younger brother, Tommy, caught the illness from him and died.

Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's childhood".

Rawls graduated in Baltimore before enrolling in the Kent School, an Episcopal preparatory school in Connecticut. Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls attended Princeton University, where he was accepted into the Ivy Club and the American Whig–Cliosophic Society. At Princeton, Rawls was influenced by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein's student. During his last two years at Princeton, he "became deeply concerned with theology and its doctrines". He considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood and wrote an "intensely religious senior thesis (BI)". In his 181-page long thesis titled "Meaning of Sin and Faith", Rawls attacked Pelagianism because it "would render the Cross of Christ to no effect". Rawls graduated from Princeton in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.

In early 1946, Rawls returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy. He married Margaret Warfield Fox, a Brown University graduate, in 1949. They had four children: Anne Warfield, Robert Lee, Alexander Emory, and Elizabeth Fox.

Rawls received his PhD from Princeton's philosophy department in 1950 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character. His PhD included a year of study at Cornell. Rawls taught at Princeton until 1952 when he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Christ Church at Oxford University, where he was influenced by the liberal political theorist and historian Isaiah Berlin and the legal theorist H. L. A. Hart.

U.S. Army service (1943–1946)

Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1943. During World War II, Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific with the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Infantry Division, where he served a tour of duty in New Guinea and was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and Bronze Star; and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed traumatizing scenes of violence and bloodshed. It was there that he lost his Christian faith.

Following the surrender of Japan, Rawls became part of General MacArthur's occupying army and was promoted to sergeant. But he became disillusioned with the military when he saw the aftermath of the atomic blast in Hiroshima. Rawls later refused an order to discipline a fellow soldier, "believing no punishment was justified", and was "demoted back to a private". By January 1946, Rawls was disenchanted with the Army and left military service.

Professorship

After returning to the United States, in the fall of 1953, Rawls became an assistant professor at Cornell University, joining his mentor Norman Malcolm in the philosophy department. Three years later Rawls received tenure at Cornell. During the 1959–60 academic year he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and he was appointed in 1960 as a professor in the humanities division at MIT. Two years later, he returned to Harvard as a professor of philosophy, and he remained there until reaching mandatory retirement age in 1991.

In 1962, he achieved a tenured position at MIT. That same year, he moved to Harvard, where he taught for almost forty years and where he trained some of the leading contemporary figures in moral and political philosophy, including Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, Thomas Nagel, Allan Gibbard, Onora O'Neill, Adrian Piper, Arnold Davidson, Elizabeth S. Anderson, Christine Korsgaard, Susan Neiman, Claudia Card, Rainer Forst, Thomas Pogge, T. M. Scanlon, Barbara Herman, Joshua Cohen, Thomas E. Hill Jr., Gurcharan Das, Andreas Teuber, Henry S. Richardson, Nancy Sherman, Samuel Freeman and Paul Weithman. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard.

Rawls was, for a time, a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society. He was put forward for membership by Milton Friedman in 1968, and withdrew from the society three years later, just before his A Theory of Justice was published.

Later life

Rawls rarely gave interviews and, having both a stutter (which he attributed to the deaths of two of his brothers, who died through infections contracted from Rawls) and a "bat-like horror of the limelight", did not become a public intellectual despite his fame. He instead remained committed mainly to his academic and family life.

In 1995, he had the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to continue to work. He was nevertheless able to complete The Law of Peoples, the most complete statement of his views on international justice. Published in 2001 shortly before his death was Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, a response to criticisms of A Theory of Justice.

Death

Rawls died from heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2002, at age 81. He was buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.

Philosophy

Rawls published three main books. The first, A Theory of Justice, focused on distributive justice and attempted to reconcile the competing claims of the values of freedom and equality. The second, Political Liberalism, addressed the question of how citizens divided by intractable religious and philosophical disagreements could come to endorse a constitutional democratic regime. The third, The Law of Peoples, focused on the issue of global justice.

A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, aimed to resolve the seemingly competing claims of freedom and equality. The shape Rawls's resolution took, however, was not that of a balancing act that compromised or weakened the moral claim of one value compared with the other. Rather, his intent was to show that notions of freedom and equality could be integrated into a seamless unity he called justice as fairness. By attempting to enhance the perspective which his readers should take when thinking about justice, Rawls hoped to show that conflict between freedom and equality is illusory.

Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) includes a thought experiment he called the "original position". The intuition behind it is that political philosophy will be greatly benefited by a specification of the correct standpoint a person should take in their thinking about justice. When we think about what a just state of affairs between persons would mean, we eliminate certain features such as hair or eye color, height, or race, and focus upon others. Rawls's original position is meant to encode our intuitions about which features are relevant, and which are irrelevant, for the purposes of deliberating well about justice.

The original position is Rawls's hypothetical scenario in which a group of persons is set the task of reaching an agreement about the kind of political and economic structure they want for a society, which they will then occupy. Each individual, however, deliberates behind a "veil of ignorance": each lacks knowledge, for example, of their gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, religion, and disability status. The only thing that a given member knows about themselves is that they are in possession of the basic capacities necessary to fully participate in an enduring system of mutual cooperation; each knows they can be a member of the society.

Rawls posits two basic capacities that the individuals would know they possess. First, individuals know that they have the capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good, or life plan. Exactly what sort of conception of the good this is, however, the individual does not yet know. It may be, for example, religious or secular, but at the start, the individual in the original position does not know which. Second, each individual understands that they have the capacity to develop a sense of justice and a generally effective desire to abide by it. Knowing only these two features of themselves, the group will deliberate in order to design a social structure, during which each person will seek their maximum advantage. The idea is that proposals that we would ordinarily think of as unjust—such as that black people or women should not be allowed to hold public office—will not be proposed in this, Rawls's original position, because it would be irrational to propose them. The reason is simple: one does not know whether he himself would be a woman or a black person. This position is expressed in the difference principle, according to which, in a system of ignorance about one's status, one would strive to improve the position of the worst off, because he might find himself in that position.

Political Liberalism

In Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned towards the question of political legitimacy in the context of intractable philosophical, religious, and moral disagreement amongst citizens regarding the human good. Such disagreement, he insisted, was reasonable—the result of the free exercise of human rationality under the conditions of open enquiry and free conscience that the liberal state is designed to safeguard. The question of legitimacy in the face of reasonable disagreement was urgent for Rawls because his own justification of Justice as Fairness relied upon a Kantian conception of the human good that can be reasonably rejected. If the political conception offered in A Theory of Justice can only be shown to be good by invoking a controversial conception of human flourishing, it is unclear how a liberal state ordered according to it could possibly be legitimate.

The intuition animating this seemingly new concern is actually no different from the guiding idea of A Theory of Justice, namely that the fundamental charter of a society must rely only on principles, arguments and reasons that cannot be reasonably rejected by the citizens whose lives will be limited by its social, legal, and political circumscriptions. In other words, the legitimacy of a law is contingent upon its justification being impossible to reasonably reject. This old insight took on a new shape, however, when Rawls realized that its application must extend to the deep justification of Justice as Fairness itself, which he had presented in terms of a reasonably rejectable (Kantian) conception of human flourishing as the free development of autonomous moral agency.

The core of Political Liberalism is its insistence that in order to retain its legitimacy, the liberal state must commit itself to the "ideal of public reason". This roughly means that citizens in their public capacity must engage one another only in terms of reasons whose status as reasons is shared between them. Political reasoning, then, is to proceed purely in terms of "public reasons". For example: a Supreme Court justice deliberating on whether or not the denial to homosexuals of the ability to marry constitutes a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause may not advert to his religious convictions on the matter, but he may take into account the argument that a same-sex household provides sub-optimal conditions for a child's development. This is because reasons based upon the interpretation of sacred text are non-public (their force as reasons relies upon faith commitments that can be reasonably rejected), whereas reasons that rely upon the value of providing children with environments in which they may develop optimally are public reasons—their status as reasons draws upon no deep, controversial conception of human flourishing.

The Law of Peoples

Although there were passing comments on international affairs in A Theory of Justice, it was not until late in his career that Rawls formulated a comprehensive theory of international politics with the publication of The Law of Peoples. He claimed there that "well-ordered" peoples could be either "liberal" or "decent". Rawls's basic distinction in international politics is that his preferred emphasis on a society of peoples is separate from the more conventional and historical discussion of international politics as based on relationships between states.

Rawls argued that the legitimacy of a liberal international order is contingent on tolerating decent peoples, which differ from liberal peoples, among other ways, in that they might have state religions and deny adherents of minority faiths the right to hold positions of power within the state and might organize political participation via consultation hierarchies rather than elections. However, no well-ordered peoples may violate human rights or behave in an externally aggressive manner. Peoples that fail to meet the criteria of "liberal" or "decent" peoples are referred to as 'outlaw states', 'societies burdened by unfavorable conditions' or 'benevolent absolutisms', depending on their particular failings. Such peoples do not have the right to mutual respect and toleration possessed by liberal and decent peoples.

Rawls's views on global distributive justice as they were expressed in this work surprised many of his fellow egalitarian liberals. For example, Charles Beitz had previously written a study that argued for the application of Rawls's Difference Principles globally. Rawls denied that his principles should be so applied, partly on the grounds that a world state does not exist and would not be stable. This notion has been challenged, as a comprehensive system of global governance has arisen, amongst others in the form of the Bretton Woods system, that serves to distribute primary social goods between human beings. It has thus been argued that a cosmopolitan application of the theory of justice as fairness is the more reasonable alternative to the application of The Law of Peoples, as it would be more legitimate towards all persons over whom political coercive power is exercised.

According to Rawls, however, nation states, unlike citizens, were self-sufficient in the cooperative enterprises that constitute domestic societies. Although Rawls recognized that aid should be given to governments which are unable to protect human rights for economic reasons, he claimed that the purpose for this aid is not to achieve an eventual state of global equality, but rather only to ensure that these societies could maintain liberal or decent political institutions. He argued, among other things, that continuing to give aid indefinitely would see nations with industrious populations subsidize those with idle populations and would create a moral hazard problem where governments could spend irresponsibly in the knowledge that they will be bailed out by those nations who had spent responsibly.

Reception

Despite the exacting, academic tone of Rawls's writing and his reclusive personality, his philosophical work has exerted an enormous impact on not only contemporary moral and political philosophy but also public political discourse. During the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989, copies of A Theory of Justice were brandished by protesters in the face of government officials. Despite being approximately 600 pages long, over 300,000 copies of that book have been sold, stimulating critical responses from utilitarian, feminist, conservative, libertarian, Catholic, communitarian, Marxist and Green scholars.

Although having a profound influence on theories of distributive justice both in theory and in practice, the generally anti-meritocratic sentiment of Rawls's thinking has not been widely accepted by the political left. He consistently held the view that naturally developed skills and endowments could not be neatly distinguished from inherited ones, and that neither could be used to justify moral desert. Instead, he held the view that individuals could "legitimately expect" entitlements to the earning of income or development of abilities based on institutional arrangements. This aspect of Rawls's work has been instrumental in the development of such ideas as luck egalitarianism and unconditional basic income, which have themselves been criticized. The strictly egalitarian quality of Rawls's second principle of justice has called into question the type of equality that fair societies ought to embody.

Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer produced a range of critical responses contesting the universalist basis of Rawls's original position. While these criticisms, which emphasize the cultural and social roots of normative political principles, are typically described as communitarian critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, none of their authors identified with philosophical communitarianism. In his later works, Rawls attempted to reconcile his theory of justice with the possibility that its normative foundations may not be universally applicable.

The late philosopher G. A. Cohen, along with political scientist Jon Elster, and John Roemer, used Rawls's writings extensively to inaugurate the Analytical Marxism movement in the 1980s.

In the later part of Rawls's career, he engaged with the scholarly work of Jürgen Habermas (see Habermas–Rawls debate). Habermas's reading of Rawls led to an appreciation of Rawls's work and other analytical philosophers by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and many of Habermas's own students and associates were expected to be familiar with Rawls by the late 1980s. The Leibniz Prize–winning political philosopher Rainer Forst was advised by both Rawls and Habermas in completing his PhD. Axel Honneth, Fabian Freyenhagen, and James Gordon Finlayson have also drawn on Rawls's work in comparison to Habermas.

Personal life

Marriage and family

Rawl married Margaret Warfield "Mard" Fox in 1949, and had four children. She was a major collaborator who proofread, edited, and helped index his massive manuscripts.

Religious views

Raised a devout Episcopalian, at Princeton University while working toward a undergraduate he even considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood, but decided to enlist into the army during World War II. His military service would eventually motivated him to abandon his faith. In his personal 1997 essay, On My Religion, he explained that after the Holocaust and his experiences in World War II, he found it impossible to believe in a traditional, personal God who actively directs human history or answers prayers.

Awards and honors

Bronze Star for radio work behind enemy lines in World War II

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966)

Ralph Waldo Emerson Award (1972)

Elected to the American Philosophical Society (1974)

Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (1992)

Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy (1999)

National Humanities Medal (1999)

Asteroid 16561 Rawls is named in his honor.

In popular culture

John Rawls is featured as the protagonist of A Theory of Justice: The Musical, a musical comedy that premiered at Oxford in 2013 and was revived for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Publications

Bibliography

A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character. Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1950.

A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. The revised edition of 1999 incorporates changes that Rawls made for translated editions of A Theory of Justice.

Political Liberalism. The John Dewey Essays in Philosophy, 4. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. The hardback edition published in 1993 is not identical. The paperback adds a new introduction and an essay titled "Reply to Habermas".

The Law of Peoples: with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. This slim book includes two works; a further development of his essay titled "The Law of Peoples", and another titled "Public Reason Revisited", both published earlier in his career.

Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. This collection of shorter papers was edited by Samuel Freeman.

Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. This collection of lectures was edited by Barbara Herman. It has an introduction on modern moral philosophy from 1600 to 1800 and then lectures on Hume, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel.

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001. This shorter summary of the main arguments of Rawls's political philosophy was edited by Erin Kelly. Many versions of this were circulated in typescript and much of the material was delivered by Rawls in lectures when he taught courses covering his own work at Harvard University.

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Collection of lectures on Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Joseph Butler, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, edited by Samuel Freeman.

Articles

"Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics". Philosophical Review (April 1951), 60 (2): 177–197.

"Two Concepts of Rules". Philosophical Review (January 1955), 64 (1):3–32.

"Justice as Fairness". Journal of Philosophy (October 24, 1957), 54 (22): 353–362.

"Justice as Fairness". Philosophical Review (April 1958), 67 (2): 164–194.

"The Sense of Justice". Philosophical Review (July 1963), 72 (3): 281–305.

"Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice". Nomos VI (1963)

"Distributive Justice: Some Addenda". Natural Law Forum (1968), 13: 51–71.

"Reply to Lyons and Teitelman". Journal of Philosophy (October 5, 1972), 69 (18): 556–557.

"Reply to Alexander and Musgrave". Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1974), 88 (4): 633–655.

"Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion". American Economic Review (May 1974), 64 (2): 141–146.

"Fairness to Goodness". Philosophical Review (October 1975), 84 (4): 536–554.

"The Independence of Moral Theory". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (November 1975), 48: 5–22.

"A Kantian Conception of Equality". Cambridge Review (February 1975), 96 (2225): 94–99.

Book chapters

"Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice". In Carl J. Friedrich and John W. Chapman, eds., Nomos, VI: Justice, pp. 98–125. Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. New York: Atherton Press, 1963.

"Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play". In Sidney Hook, ed., Law and Philosophy: A Symposium, pp. 3–18. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Proceedings of the 6th Annual New York University Institute of Philosophy.

"Distributive Justice". In Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society. Third Series, pp. 58–82. London: Blackwell; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967.

"The Justification of Civil Disobedience". In Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, pp. 240–255. New York: Pegasus Books, 1969.

"Justice as Reciprocity". In Samuel Gorovitz, ed., Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill: With Critical Essays, pp. 242–268. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

"Author's Note". In Thomas Schwartz, ed., Freedom and Authority: An Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy, p. 260. Encino & Belmont, California: Dickenson, 1973.

"Distributive Justice". In Edmund S. Phelps, ed., Economic Justice: Selected Readings, pp. 319–362. Penguin Modern Economics Readings. Harmondsworth & Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973.

"Personal Communication, January 31, 1976". In Thomas Nagel's "The Justification of Equality". Critica (April 1978), 10 (28): 9n4.

"The Basic Liberties and Their Priority". In Sterling M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, III (1982), pp. 1–87. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

"Social unity and primary goods" in Sen, Amartya; Williams, Bernard, eds. (1982). Utilitarianism and beyond. Cambridge / Paris: Cambridge University Press / Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. pp. 159–185. ISBN 978-0511611964.

Reviews

Review of Axel Hägerström's Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals (C.D. Broad, tr.). Mind (July 1955), 64 (255):421–422.

Review of Stephen Toulmin's An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). Philosophical Review (October 1951), 60 (4): 572–580.

Review of A. Vilhelm Lundstedt's Legal Thinking Revised. Cornell Law Quarterly (1959), 44: 169.

Review of Raymond Klibansky, ed., Philosophy in Mid-Century: A Survey. Philosophical Review (January 1961), 70 (1): 131–132.

Review of Richard B. Brandt, ed., Social Justice (1962). Philosophical Review (July 1965), 74(3): 406–409.