John Rawls
John BrodleyRawlswas an
American moral and political philosopher. He held the James Bryant Conant University of Professorship
at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
He was born on February 21,1921, Baltimore, Maryland, United States and died on
November 24, 2002, Lexington, Massachusetts United States. He was best known
for his defense of egalitarian liberalism in his major work, “A Theory of
Justice” (1971). He is widely considered the most important political
philosopher of the 20th century. John
Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland as the second son to one of
Baltimore’s most influential attorneys William Lee Rawls and his wife Anna
Abell Stump Rawls. At a young age, Rawls and his family were struck by two
tragedies. When he was 8 years old, Rawls got a contagious bacterial disease
diphtheria. He recovered but his younger brother who contracted the disease
from him didn’t and died from complications. One year later, Rawls got ill from
pneumonia. Another younger brother contracted the illness from him and
died.Rawls went to school in Baltimore and continued education at Kent School
in Connecticut. After graduating from Kent School, he studied at the Princeton
University. Soon after graduating from the Princeton University, Rawls was
enlisted in the US Army and sent to the Pacific theatre.
During World War II, Rawls
served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New
Guinea and was awarded a Bronze Star; and the Philippines,
where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed horrific scenes such as
seeing a soldier remove his helmet and take a bullet to the head, rather than
continue with the war. There, 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
then disobeyed an order to discipline a fellow soldier, believing no punishment
was justified, and was demoted back to private. Disenchanted, he left the
military in January 1946. After his military service, Rawls became
an atheist.After leaving the Army,Rawls
returned to Princeton where he received a doctorate from philosophy in 1949. In
the same year, he married Margaret Fox with whom he had four children. Until
1952, he taught at the Princeton University and then went to the Oxford
University through the Fulbright Programme. Upon returning to the United
States, Rawls began to work at the Cornell University as an assistant
professor. In 1962, he became full professor at the Cornell University but in
the same year, he took the position of a professor of philosophy at the Harvard
University where he taught until the 1990s. Despite his international fame,
Rawls more or less lived a withdrawn life. Instead of becoming a public
intellectual, he spent most of his time as an academic and family person. In
1995, he suffered a stroke which prevented him from continuing with his work.
However, he was able to write three more books – The Law of Peoples, Lectures
on the History of Moral Philosophy and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement which
was published shortly before his death. John Rawls died in 2002, aged 81. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defends
a conception of “justice as
fairness.” He holds that an adequate account of justice cannot be
derived from utilitarianism, because
that doctrine is consistent with intuitively undesirable forms of government in
which the greater happiness of a majority is
achieved by neglecting the rights and interests of a minority. Reviving the notion of a social contract, Rawls argues that justice consists of the
basic principles of government that free and rational individuals would agree
to in a hypothetical situation of perfect equality. In order to
ensure that the principles chosen are fair, Rawls imagines a group of
individuals who have been made ignorant of the social, economic, and historical
circumstances from which they come, as well as their basic values and goals,
including their conception of what constitutes a “good life.”
Situated behind this “veil of ignorance,” they could not be influenced by
self-interested desires to benefit some social groups at the expense of others
In this “original position,” as Rawls characterizes it, any group of
individuals would be led by reason and self-interest to agree to the following
principles:
1. Each person is
to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a
similar liberty for others.
2. Social and
economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and
attached to offices and positions open
to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
The “basic liberty” mentioned in principle
1 comprises most of the rights and liberties traditionally associated
with liberalism and democracy: freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of association, the right to
representative government, the right to form and join political parties, the
right to personal property, and the rights and liberties
necessary to secure the rule of law. Economic
rights and liberties, such as freedom of contract or the right to own means of
production, are not among the basic liberties as Rawls construes them. Basic
liberties cannot be infringed under any circumstances, even if doing so would
increase the aggregate welfare, improve economic efficiency, or
augment the income of the poor.Principle 2 provides that everyone has a fair
and equal opportunity to compete for desirable public or private offices and positions. This entails that society
must provide all citizens with the basic means necessary to participate in such
competition, including appropriate education and health care. Clause a of principle 2 is known as the “difference
principle”: it requires that any unequal distribution of wealth and
income be such that those who are worst off are better off than
they would be under any other distribution consistent with principle 1,
including an equal distribution. Rawls holds that some inequality of wealth and
income is probably necessary in order to maintain high levels of productivity.
A just society, according to Rawls, would
be a “property-owning democracy” in which ownership of the means
of production is widely distributed and those who are worst off are prosperous
enough to be economically independent.
