Jump to content
 







Main menu
   


Navigation  



Main page
Contents
Current events
Random article
About Wikipedia
Contact us
Donate
 




Contribute  



Help
Learn to edit
Community portal
Recent changes
Upload file
 








Search  

































Create account

Log in
 









Create account
 Log in
 




Pages for logged out editors learn more  



Contributions
Talk
 



















Contents

   



(Top)
 


1 Biography  



1.1  Early life and education  





1.2  Military service, 194346  





1.3  Academic career  





1.4  Later life  







2 Philosophical thought  



2.1  A Theory of Justice  



2.1.1  Principles of justice  







2.2  Political Liberalism  





2.3  The Law of Peoples  







3 Influence and reception  



3.1  Communitarian critique  





3.2  September Group  





3.3  Frankfurt School  





3.4  Feminist political philosophy  







4 Awards and honors  





5 In popular culture  





6 Publications  



6.1  Bibliography  





6.2  Articles  





6.3  Book chapters  





6.4  Reviews  







7 See also  





8 References  





9 Further reading  





10 External links  














John Rawls






Afrikaans
العربية
Արեւմտահայերէն
Asturianu
Azərbaycanca
Български
Català
Čeština
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Eesti
Ελληνικά
Español
Esperanto
Euskara
فارسی
Français
Frysk
Galego

Հայերեն
ि
Hrvatski
Bahasa Indonesia
Íslenska
Italiano
עברית
Jawa
Қазақша
Latina
Lietuvių
Magyar
Malagasy

مصرى
Nederlands

Norsk bokmål
Norsk nynorsk
Occitan

پښتو
Polski
Português
Română
Русский
Simple English
Slovenčina
Slovenščina
کوردی
Српски / srpski
Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски
Suomi
Svenska
ி
Türkçe
Українська
Tiếng Vit
Winaray

Yorùbá


 

Edit links
 









Article
Talk
 

















Read
Edit
View history
 








Tools
   


Actions  



Read
Edit
View history
 




General  



What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Cite this page
Get shortened URL
Download QR code
Wikidata item
 




Print/export  



Download as PDF
Printable version
 




In other projects  



Wikimedia Commons
Wikiquote
 
















Appearance
   

 






From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 


John Rawls
Black-and-white portrait photograph of John Rawls wearing glasses
Rawls in 1971
Born

John Bordley Rawls


(1921-02-21)February 21, 1921
DiedNovember 24, 2002(2002-11-24) (aged 81)
EducationPrinceton University (BA, PhD)
Christ Church, Oxford
Notable workA Theory of Justice (1971)
Political Liberalism (1993)
Spouse

Margaret Warfield Fox

(m. 1949)
AwardsRolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (1999)
National Humanities Medal (1999)
Era20th-century philosophy
21st-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
  • Social liberalism
  • InstitutionsPrinceton University
    Cornell University
    Harvard University
    Thesis
  • Doctoral advisorWalter Terence Stace
    Doctoral students

     

    Main interests

  • Social contract theory
  • Democracy
  • Political legitimacy
  • Instrumental and value rationality
  • Notable ideas

  • Original position
  • Reflective equilibrium
  • Overlapping consensus
  • Property-owning democracy
  • Public reason
  • Liberal neutrality[1]
  • Veil of ignorance
  • Deliberative democracy
  • Liberal socialism
  • Primary goods
  • Telishment
  • Signature
    John Rawls signature

    John Bordley Rawls (/rɔːlz/;[2] February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition.[3][4] Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.[5]

    In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "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".[6][7] 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. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice 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. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls turned to the question of how political power could be made legitimate given reasonable disagreement about the nature of the good life.

    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".[8]

    Among contemporary political philosophers, Rawls is frequently cited by the courts of law in the United States and Canada[9] and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom. In a 2008 national survey of political theorists, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, Rawls was voted first on the list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years".[10]

    Biography[edit]

    Early life and education[edit]

    Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland.[11] He was the second of five sons born to William Lee Rawls, a prominent Baltimore attorney, and Anna Abell Stump Rawls.[12][13] 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.[14]

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

    Photo portrait of a young man with short hair wearing a suit and tie
    Rawls as a Kent School senior, 1937

    Rawls graduated in Baltimore before enrolling in the Kent School, an Episcopalian preparatory schoolinConnecticut. 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)."[15] 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."[16] Rawls graduated from Princeton in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.[13]

    Military service, 1943–46[edit]

    Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1943. During World War II, Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he served a tour of duty in New Guinea and was awarded a Bronze Star; and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed traumatizing scenes of violence and bloodshed.[17] It was there that he lost his Christian faith and became an atheist.[15][18][19]

    Following the surrender of Japan, Rawls became part of General MacArthur's occupying army[13] 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.[17]

    Academic career[edit]

    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.[13]

    Rawls received his PhD from Princeton 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 FellowshiptoChrist ChurchatOxford 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, he served first as an assistant and then associate professor at Cornell University.

    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.

    In 1962, he 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, 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.[20]

    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.[21]

    Later life[edit]

    Rawls rarely gave interviews and, having both a stutter (partially caused by 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.[12]

    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 and published in 2001 shortly before his death 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.[3] He was buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife, four children, and four grandchildren.[22]

    Philosophical thought[edit]

    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[edit]

    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 the supposed conflict between freedom and equality to be illusory.

    Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) includes a thought experiment he called the "original position." The intuition motivating its employment is this: the enterprise of 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 it would mean for a just state of affairs to obtain between persons, we eliminate certain features (such as hair or eye color, height, race, etc.) and fixate upon others. Rawls's original position is meant to encode all of our intuitions about which features are relevant, and which 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 and religion. The only thing that a given member knows about themselves is that they are in possession of the basic capacities necessary to fully and willfully participate in an enduring system of mutual cooperation; each knows they can be a member of the society.

    Green book cover
    A Theory of Justice, 1st ed.
    Illustration showing two groups and a wall (or veil) separating them: the first group at left are uniform stick figures, while the group at right are more diverse in terms of gender, race, and other qualities
    Visual illustration of the "original position" and "veil of ignorance"
    Citizens making choices about their society are asked to make them from an "original position" of equality (at left) behind a "veil of ignorance" (wall, center), without knowing what gender, race, abilities, tastes, wealth, or position in society they will have (at right). Rawls claims this will cause them to choose "fair" policies.

    Rawls posits two basic capacities that the individuals would know themselves to 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 themselves to 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 maximal 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.

    Rawls develops his original position by modeling it, in certain respects at least, after the "initial situations" of various social contract thinkers who came before him, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Each social contractarian constructs their initial situation somewhat differently, having in mind a unique political morality they intend the thought experiment to generate.[23] Iain King has suggested the original position draws on Rawls's experiences in post-war Japan, where the US Army was challenged with designing new social and political authorities for the country, while "imagining away all that had gone before."[17]

    In social justice processes, each person early on makes decisions about which features of persons to consider and which to ignore. Rawls's aspiration is to have created a thought experiment whereby a version of that process is carried to its completion, illuminating the correct standpoint a person should take in their thinking about justice. If he has succeeded, then the original position thought experiment may function as a full specification of the moral standpoint we should attempt to achieve when deliberating about social justice.

    In setting out his theory, Rawls described his method as one of "reflective equilibrium," a concept which has since been used in other areas of philosophy. Reflective equilibrium is achieved by mutually adjusting one's general principles and one's considered judgements on particular cases, to bring the two into line with one another.

    Principles of justice[edit]

    Rawls derives two principles of justice from the original position. The first of these is the Liberty Principle, which establishes equal basic liberties for all citizens. 'Basic' liberty entails the (familiar in the liberal tradition) freedoms of conscience, association and expression as well as democratic rights; Rawls also includes a personal property right, but this is defended in terms of moral capacities and self-respect,[24] rather than an appeal to a natural right of self-ownership (this distinguishes Rawls's account from the classical liberalism of John Locke and the libertarianismofRobert Nozick).

    Rawls argues that a second principle of equality would be agreed upon to guarantee liberties that represent meaningful options for all in society and ensure distributive justice. For example, formal guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real worth to the desperately poor and marginalized in society. Demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life would almost certainly offend the very liberties that are supposedly being equalized. Nonetheless, we would want to ensure at least the "fair worth" of our liberties: wherever one ends up in society, one wants life to be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals. Thus, participants would be moved to affirm a two-part second principle comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the famous (and controversial[25]) difference principle. This second principle ensures that those with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances and that inequalities in society work to the benefit of the least advantaged.

    Rawls held that these principles of justice apply to the "basic structure" of fundamental social institutions (such as the judiciary, the economic structure and the political constitution), a qualification that has been the source of some controversy and constructive debate (see the work of Gerald Cohen). Rawls's theory of justice stakes out the task of equalizing the distribution of primary social goods to those least advantaged in society and thus may be seen as a largely political answer to the question of justice, with matters of morality somewhat conflated into a political account of justice and just institutions. Relational approaches to the question of justice, by contrast, seek to examine the connections between individuals and focuses on their relations in societies, with respect to how these relationships are established and configured.[26]

    Rawls further argued that these principles were to be 'lexically ordered' to award priority to basic liberties over the more equality-oriented demands of the second principle. This has also been a topic of much debate among moral and political philosophers.

    Finally, Rawls took his approach as applying in the first instance to what he called a "well-ordered society ... designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice."[27] In this respect, he understood justice as fairness as a contribution to "ideal theory," the determination of "principles that characterize a well-ordered society under favorable circumstances."[28]

    Political Liberalism[edit]

    Beige book cover with simple black and red shapes
    First edition of Political Liberalism

    InPolitical 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.[citation needed] 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.

    Rawls held that the duty of civility—the duty of citizens to offer one another reasons that are mutually understood as reasons—applies within what he called the "public political forum." This forum extends from the upper reaches of government—for example the supreme legislative and judicial bodies of the society—all the way down to the deliberations of a citizen deciding for whom to vote in state legislatures or how to vote in public referendums. Campaigning politicians should also, he believed, refrain from pandering to the non-public religious or moral convictions of their constituencies.

    The ideal of public reason secures the dominance of the public political values—freedom, equality, and fairness—that serve as the foundation of the liberal state. But what about the justification of these values? Since any such justification would necessarily draw upon deep (religious or moral) metaphysical commitments which would be reasonably rejectable, Rawls held that the public political values may only be justified privately by individual citizens. The public liberal political conception and its attendant values may and will be affirmed publicly (in judicial opinions and presidential addresses, for example) but its deep justifications will not. The task of justification falls to what Rawls called the "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" and the citizens who subscribe to them. A reasonable Catholic will justify the liberal values one way, a reasonable Muslim another, and a reasonable secular citizen yet another way. One may illustrate Rawls's idea using a Venn diagram: the public political values will be the shared space upon which overlap numerous reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Rawls's account of stability presented in A Theory of Justice is a detailed portrait of the compatibility of one—Kantian—comprehensive doctrine with justice as fairness. His hope is that similar accounts may be presented for many other comprehensive doctrines. This is Rawls's famous notion of an "overlapping consensus."

    Such a consensus would necessarily exclude some doctrines, namely, those that are "unreasonable", and so one may wonder what Rawls has to say about such doctrines. An unreasonable comprehensive doctrine is unreasonable in the sense that it is incompatible with the duty of civility. This is simply another way of saying that an unreasonable doctrine is incompatible with the fundamental political values a liberal theory of justice is designed to safeguard—freedom, equality and fairness. So one answer to the question of what Rawls has to say about such doctrines is—nothing. For one thing, the liberal state cannot justify itself to individuals (such as religious fundamentalists) who hold to such doctrines, because any such justification would—as has been noted—proceed in terms of controversial moral or religious commitments that are excluded from the public political forum. But, more importantly, the goal of the Rawlsian project is primarily to determine whether or not the liberal conception of political legitimacy is internally coherent, and this project is carried out by the specification of what sorts of reasons persons committed to liberal values are permitted to use in their dialogue, deliberations and arguments with one another about political matters. The Rawlsian project has this goal to the exclusion of concern with justifying liberal values to those not already committed—or at least open—to them. Rawls's concern is with whether or not the idea of political legitimacy fleshed out in terms of the duty of civility and mutual justification can serve as a viable form of public discourse in the face of the religious and moral pluralism of modern democratic society, not with justifying this conception of political legitimacy in the first place.

    Rawls also modified the principles of justice as follows (with the first principle having priority over the second, and the first half of the second having priority over the latter half):

    1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.
    2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

    These principles are subtly modified from the principles in Theory. The first principle now reads "equal claim" instead of "equal right", and he also replaces the phrase "system of basic liberties" with "a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties". The two parts of the second principle are also switched, so that the difference principle becomes the latter of the three.

    The Law of Peoples[edit]

    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.[29]

    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.

    Rawls's discussion of "non-ideal" theory, on the other hand, included a condemnation of bombing civilians and of the American bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II, as well as discussions of immigration and nuclear proliferation. He also detailed here the ideal of the statesman, a political leader who looks to the next generation and promotes international harmony, even in the face of significant domestic pressure to act otherwise. Rawls also controversially claimed that violations of human rights can legitimize military intervention in the violating states, though he also expressed the hope that such societies could be induced to reform peacefully by the good example of liberal and decent peoples.

    Influence and reception[edit]

    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.[30][31][32] Despite being approximately 600 pages long, over 300,000 copies of that book have been sold,[33] 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.[34] 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.[35][36] 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.[37][38]

    In a 2008 national survey of political theorists, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, Rawls was voted first on the list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years".[10]

    Communitarian critique[edit]

    Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer produced a range of critical responses contesting the universalist basis of Rawls' 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.[39]

    September Group[edit]

    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.

    Frankfurt School[edit]

    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 Schoolofcritical theory, and many of Habermas's own students and associates were expected to be familiar with Rawls by the late 1980s.[40] The Leibniz Prize-winning political philosopher Rainer Forst was advised by both by Rawls and Habermas in completing his PhD.[41][42] Axel Honneth, Fabian Freyenhagen, and James Gordon Finlayson have also drawn on Rawls's work in comparison to Habermas.

    Feminist political philosophy[edit]

    Philosopher Eva Kittay has extended the work of John Rawls to address the concerns of women and cognitively disabled people.[43]

    Awards and honors[edit]

    In popular culture[edit]

    John Rawls is featured as the protagonist of A Theory of Justice: The Musical!, an award-nominated musical comedy, which premiered at Oxford in 2013 and was revived for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.[48]

    Publications[edit]

    Bibliography[edit]

    Articles[edit]

    Book chapters[edit]

    Reviews[edit]

    See also[edit]

    References[edit]

  • ^ "Rawls" entry in Random House Dictionary, Random House, 2013.
  • ^ a b Martin, Douglas (November 26, 2002). "John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82 [corrected]". The New York Times. p. C19. Archived from the original on April 11, 2016. Retrieved February 19, 2017.
  • ^ Wenar, Leif (2017). "John Rawls". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Archived from the original on April 4, 2019. Retrieved August 22, 2017.
  • ^ Williamson, Thad (2012). ""Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Argument" by Catherine H. Zuckert (Ed.)". Cambridge University Press. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
  • ^ Kymlicka, Will (1990). Contemporary political philosophy : an introduction. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press. pp. 11. ISBN 978-0198277248. OCLC 21762535.
  • ^ Swift, Adam (2006). Political philosophy : a beginners' guide for students and politicians (Second edition, revised and expanded ed.). Cambridge: Polity. pp. 10. ISBN 978-0745635323. OCLC 63136336.
  • ^ Weinstein, Michael M. (December 1, 2002). "The Nation; Bringing Logic To Bear on Liberal Dogma". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on June 28, 2023. Retrieved September 7, 2021.
  • ^ "Fair Opportunity to Participate". The Canadian Political Science Review. June 2009. Archived from the original on March 28, 2013. Retrieved July 28, 2011.
  • ^ a b Moore, Matthew J. (2009). "Political Theory Today: Results of a National Survey". American Political Science Association 2009 Annual Meeting. Rochester, NY. SSRN 1463648.
  • ^ "John Rawls (1921-2002) | Issue 121 | Philosophy Now". philosophynow.org. Archived from the original on November 4, 2022. Retrieved November 4, 2022.
  • ^ a b Rogers, Ben (November 27, 2002). "Obituary: John Rawls". The Guardian. Archived from the original on August 7, 2019. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
  • ^ a b c d Freeman, 2010:xix
  • ^ Gordon, David (2008-07-28) Going Off the Rawls Archived 2012-02-24 at the Wayback Machine, The American Conservative
  • ^ a b Wenar, Leif (January 1, 2013). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). John Rawls (Winter 2013 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  • ^ Rawls, John Bordley (1942). A Brief Inquiry Into The Meaning of Sin and Faith (BA thesis). Princeton University. Archived from the original on December 23, 2023.
  • ^ a b c "Thinkers at War - John Rawls | Military History Matters". Military History Matters. June 13, 2014. Archived from the original on December 23, 2023. Retrieved December 23, 2023.
  • ^ "John Rawls: Theorist of Modern Liberalism". The Heritage Foundation. August 13, 2014. Archived from the original on November 2, 2019. Retrieved February 26, 2017.
  • ^ Ronald J. Sider; Paul Charles Kemeny; Derek H. Davis; Clarke E. Cochran; Corwin Smidt (2009). Church, State and Public Justice: Five Views. InterVarsity Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0830874743. Religious beliefs, argues John Rawls—a Harvard philosopher and self-identifying atheist—can be so divisive in a pluralistic culture that they subvert the stability of a society.
  • ^ "John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82 | New York Times". New York Times. November 26, 2002. Retrieved January 20, 2024.
  • ^ Offer, Avner; Söderberg, Gabriel (2016). The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. Princeton University Press. p. 272. ISBN 9780691166032.
  • ^ "John Rawls, influential political philosopher, dead at 81". December 5, 2002. Archived from the original on July 20, 2019. Retrieved June 25, 2018.
  • ^ Nussbaum, Martha Craven (2007). Frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. The Tanner lectures on human values (1st ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0674024106.
  • ^ Rawls 2001, pp. 114
  • ^ Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. pp. Chapter 7.
  • ^ Young Kim, Justice as Right Actions: An Original Theory of Justice in Conversation with Major Contemporary Accounts Archived June 9, 2023, at the Wayback Machine. Lexington Books, 2015. ISBN 978-1498516518; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford University Press, 1990.[ISBN missing]
  • ^ Rawls 1971, pp. 397
  • ^ Rawls 1971, pp. 216
  • ^ Pols, Paul (2010). Applying Rawls in a Globalizing World (Thesis). University of Utrecht. Archived from the original on August 9, 2022. Retrieved June 4, 2022.
  • ^ "With NEH grant, Notre Dame philosopher Paul Weithman planning conference on enduring impact of John Rawls // College of Arts and Letters // University of Notre Dame". September 23, 2020. Archived from the original on April 26, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ Korsgaard, Christine; Sen, Amartya; Thompson, Dennis; Scanlon, Thomas (May 19, 2005). "John Rawls". Harvard Gazette. Archived from the original on June 2, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ "More Than Just a Theory | Quest Research Magazine". April 2, 2013. Archived from the original on April 26, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ "A Theory of Justice, 1971". Harvard University Press. Archived from the original on April 22, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ Rogers, Ben (June 1999). "John Rawls". Archived from the original on May 21, 2021. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ Anderson, Elizabeth S. (January 1999). "What is the Point of Equality?". Ethics. 109 (2): 287–337. doi:10.1086/233897. JSTOR 2989479. S2CID 144596596 – via JSTOR.
  • ^ Van Parijs, Philippe (1991). "Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income". Philosophy & Public Affairs. 20 (2): 101–131. JSTOR 2265291.
  • ^ "Amartya Sen (May 22,1979). "Equality of What?" The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Stanford University" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on June 22, 2023. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  • ^ Cohen, G. A. (1990). "Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods and Capabilities". Recherches Économiques de Louvain / Louvain Economic Review. 56 (3/4): 357–382. doi:10.1017/S0770451800043943. JSTOR 40723932. S2CID 150858493.
  • ^ "Communitarianism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2020. Archived from the original on September 24, 2023. Retrieved August 15, 2021.
  • ^ https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/scholaractivists/00JoelAnderson3rdGeneration.html [dead link]
  • ^ "Rainer Forst". The Jean Monnet Program. Archived from the original on June 5, 2023. Retrieved August 15, 2021.
  • ^ Forst, Rainer; Forst, Professor Rainer (2002). Contexts of Justice. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520232259. Archived from the original on June 3, 2023. Retrieved August 15, 2021.
  • ^ McAfee, Noëlle; Howard, Katie B. (2022), "Feminist Political Philosophy", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, archived from the original on January 11, 2024, retrieved March 1, 2022
  • ^ Page 12 of 'John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice' by Thomas Pogge, 2007.
  • ^ "John Rawls". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Archived from the original on August 9, 2022. Retrieved August 9, 2022.
  • ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Archived from the original on May 24, 2022. Retrieved August 9, 2022.
  • ^ "Utenlandske medlemmer" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Archived from the original on July 15, 2007. Retrieved December 27, 2021.
  • ^ "Oxford / News / Colleges / PPE finalists create revision musical". Cherwell.org. October 3, 2012. Archived from the original on March 29, 2016. Retrieved January 31, 2013.
  • Further reading[edit]

    External links[edit]

  • icon Economics
  • icon Liberalism
  • diagram Libertarianism
  • Philosophy
  • icon Politics
  • flag United States

  • Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Rawls&oldid=1225319193"

    Categories: 
    John Rawls
    1921 births
    2002 deaths
    20th-century American male writers
    20th-century American philosophers
    20th-century atheists
    20th-century American essayists
    21st-century American male writers
    21st-century American philosophers
    21st-century atheists
    21st-century American essayists
    American atheists
    American male essayists
    American male non-fiction writers
    American philosophy academics
    American political philosophers
    Analytic philosophers
    Atheist philosophers
    Burials at Mount Auburn Cemetery
    Burials in Massachusetts
    Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows
    Cornell University faculty
    Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy
    Deaths from congestive heart failure
    Former Anglicans
    Harvard University Department of Philosophy faculty
    Kantian philosophers
    Kent School alumni
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
    Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
    Liberal theorists
    National Humanities Medal recipients
    Philosophy writers
    Prejudice and discrimination
    Princeton University alumni
    Princeton University faculty
    Progressivism in the United States
    Rolf Schock Prize laureates
    Writers from Baltimore
    Writers from Boston
    United States Army personnel of World War II
    United States Army soldiers
    Members of the American Philosophical Society
    Fulbright alumni
    Hidden categories: 
    Webarchive template wayback links
    Pages with missing ISBNs
    All articles with dead external links
    Articles with dead external links from February 2022
    CS1 Norwegian-language sources (no)
    Articles with short description
    Short description matches Wikidata
    Use mdy dates from June 2023
    Biography with signature
    Articles with hCards
    Articles with excerpts
    Pages using multiple image with auto scaled images
    All articles with unsourced statements
    Articles with unsourced statements from November 2021
    Pages containing links to subscription-only content
    Articles containing Latin-language text
    Articles containing French-language text
    Articles with FAST identifiers
    Articles with ISNI identifiers
    Articles with VIAF identifiers
    Articles with WorldCat Entities identifiers
    Articles with BIBSYS identifiers
    Articles with BNC identifiers
    Articles with BNE identifiers
    Articles with BNF identifiers
    Articles with BNFdata identifiers
    Articles with CANTICN identifiers
    Articles with GND identifiers
    Articles with ICCU identifiers
    Articles with J9U identifiers
    Articles with KBR identifiers
    Articles with LCCN identifiers
    Articles with Libris identifiers
    Articles with LNB identifiers
    Articles with NDL identifiers
    Articles with NKC identifiers
    Articles with NLA identifiers
    Articles with NLG identifiers
    Articles with NLK identifiers
    Articles with NSK identifiers
    Articles with NTA identifiers
    Articles with PLWABN identifiers
    Articles with PortugalA identifiers
    Articles with VcBA identifiers
    Articles with CINII identifiers
    Articles with Google Scholar identifiers
    Articles with MATHSN identifiers
    Articles with MGP identifiers
    Articles with DTBIO identifiers
    Articles with Trove identifiers
    Articles with SNAC-ID identifiers
    Articles with SUDOC identifiers
     



    This page was last edited on 23 May 2024, at 17:55 (UTC).

    Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.



    Privacy policy

    About Wikipedia

    Disclaimers

    Contact Wikipedia

    Code of Conduct

    Developers

    Statistics

    Cookie statement

    Mobile view



    Wikimedia Foundation
    Powered by MediaWiki