John Rawls

John Rawls

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 20^th 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.