Wikipedia Deep Dive

John Rawls

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In 2008, a survey of political theorists at American colleges and universities produced a striking result: John Rawls was voted first on a list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years." The poll, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited four-year institutions, placed a man who had largely retreated from public life at the top of an entire discipline. Rawls rarely gave interviews. He had a stutter he attributed to the deaths of two of his brothers—who died after contracting fatal illnesses from him—and what one biographer called "a bat-like horror of the limelight." Yet his ideas reshaped how courts in America and Canada think about justice, how politicians in Washington and London discuss fairness, and how an entire generation of moral philosophers understand the social contract.

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; his mother, Anna Abell Stump Rawls, was active in local Democratic politics, including advocacy for women's voting rights. Tragedy struck the family at an almost unimaginable scale: two of Rawls's brothers died in childhood because they contracted fatal illnesses from him. In 1928, the seven-year-old Rawls contracted diphtheria. His brother Bobby, younger by twenty 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.

Thomas Pogge, one of Rawls's biographers, called the loss of the brothers "the most important events in John's childhood." The weight of that grief would follow him for decades.

Education at Princeton

Rawls graduated from Baltimore's public schools before enrolling in the Kent School, an Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut. Upon graduation in 1939, he attended Princeton University, where he was accepted into the Ivy Club and the American Whig–Cliosophic Society—elite social and academic institutions that would shape his intellectual life.

At Princeton, Rawls was influenced by Norman Malcolm, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein. 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" titled "Meaning of Sin and Faith." In his 181-page-long thesis, 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. He was twenty-two years old, devoutly religious, and about to enter the war that would shatter his faith.

The War and the Loss of Belief

Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1943. During World War II, he 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 and became an atheist. 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 a private." Disenchanted, he left the military in January 1946.

The war had transformed him. The boy who had defended Pelagianism in his thesis now believed that no divine plan could account for the suffering he witnessed.

Return to Philosophy

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.

He 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. 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, Rawls was a visiting professor at Harvard, 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.

The Thought Experiment That Changed Philosophy

In 1962, Rawls achieved a tenured position at MIT. That same year, he moved to Harvard University, where he taught for almost forty years and where he trained some of the leading contemporary figures in moral and political philosophy.

His students included 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 Conann University Professorship at Harvard—the kind of position that signals absolute intellectual security in American academia.

But it was his ideas, not his teaching, that would transform political philosophy.

Justice as Fairness

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. Published in 1971, it became the founding text of modern political philosophy.

"It is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971"

This was written by Will Kymlicka in 1990, but it remains accurate decades later. Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur.

The argument for these principles uses a thought experiment called the "original position," in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. This is first principles thinking applied to political theory: we design our society's rules from behind a "veil of ignorance" where we cannot know whether we'll be rich or poor, powerful or powerless.

The logic is compelling. If we don't know what we'll be in life—we might be the CEO or the street cleaner—we'll design institutions that protect everyone fairly. Rawls argued that this thought experiment reveals that reasonable people would agree to two basic principles: equal basic liberties for all, and social positions open to all under conditions of equal opportunity and fair equality.

Political Liberalism

In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls addressed the question of how political power can be exercised legitimately in a society where citizens hold diverse and often conflicting moral, religious, and philosophical points of view.

The problem is profound: how can we live together when we fundamentally disagree about what's right? Rawls's answer was to separate the "comprehensive doctrines"—the deep moral and spiritual beliefs—from the "political conception" that manages government. He argued that we should find "an overlapping consensus" on political questions while letting deeper questions remain debated.

Recognition

Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999. The latter was presented by President Bill Clinton in recognition of how his works "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one."

Among contemporary political philosophers, Rawls is frequently cited by courts of law in the United States and Canada and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom. His framework has become the vocabulary of modern democratic governance.

Final Years

In 1995, Rawls had the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to continue 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.

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

His ideas about distributive justice, the original position, and political liberalism remain the foundation of modern democratic political thought. In a 2008 poll of professors who shaped political theory, he stood first—but perhaps more importantly, his students shape how governments around the world think about fairness. The boy from Baltimore who lost two brothers to disease, who watched Hiroshima burn, who became an atheist in the Pacific war, built an intellectual framework that helped millions understand justice. His ideas about helping the least advantaged have become the language of political debate itself.