John Rawls

John Rawls (1921-2002), influential American liberal political philosopher, known for his theory of “justice as fairness”.

Rawls was educated at Princeton University, then taught at Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Harvard. He won worldwide fame with the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971). In the decades that followed, he wrote a number of articles, papers, and essays and published Political Liberalism (1993).

In A Theory of Justice Rawls took up the idea of a social contract, which had been used in different ways by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. The fundamental idea that they shared was that since people have natural rights to govern themselves and no one has a natural right to rule over others, everyone must consent to a political order if that order is to be just and legitimate. However, the tradition had stumbled in explaining how governments could be just if those agreeing were already poor or exploited, or if people were simply born into a state and had never consented to it explicitly. To meet such difficulties Rawls reinterpreted the idea of the social contract as a hypothetical one, made under conditions that would guarantee that the principles of justice chosen would be fair.

Rawls argued that it would be unfair to choose principles of justice knowing our positions in society and the talents we possess. These should be screened out by a “veil of ignorance” so that the parties choosing principles can choose impartially, without regard to their own interests or prejudices. They choose solely on the basis of knowing that they will have some rational life plan and that they have respect for others. Rawls then argued that in such an “original position” it would be most rational for the contractors to choose two specific principles of justice. The “first principle” establishes equal liberties for all, subject only to maintaining them for others. The “second principle” or “difference principle” establishes fair equality of opportunity, and restricts social and economic inequalities in the basic structure of society to those benefiting the least advantaged members of society.

In Political Liberalism Rawls defended these same principles and considered further how they could be agreed by people with diverse moral views and conceptions of the good. Rawls’s theory was grounded in fundamental intuitive ideas about respect for political equality and society as a fair system of cooperation, ideas that he believed are justified by a method of “reflective equilibrium” adjusting between a society’s political culture and the coherence of the theory as a whole.