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John Rawls (1921–2002)

Rawls revived political philosophy. A Theory of Justice (1971) gave the discipline a systematic alternative to utilitarianism for the first time in a century, and the debate it provoked — with libertarians (Nozick), communitarians (Sandel, Taylor, MacIntyre), feminists, and global justice theorists — structured anglophone political philosophy for the rest of the twentieth century. The central device is the original position: a thought experiment in which rational agents, placed behind a “veil of ignorance” that strips away knowledge of their particular circumstances, choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society. The result is justice as fairness: equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities permitted only when they benefit the least advantaged.

Life

Born in Baltimore in 1921. His childhood was marked by the deaths of two younger brothers from infections they contracted from him — diphtheria and pneumonia — experiences he rarely spoke about but that biographers have connected to the moral seriousness of his work. He served in the Pacific in World War II, visited Hiroshima after the bombing, and left the army having lost his Christian faith.

He studied philosophy at Princeton (BA, PhD) and taught at Cornell and MIT before moving to Harvard in 1962, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was famously private, methodical, and self-revising — A Theory of Justice went through decades of drafting, and Political Liberalism (1993) substantially revised the framework in response to criticisms he accepted. He suffered a series of strokes from 1995 onward but continued writing. He died in 2002.

The original position and the veil of ignorance

A Theory of Justice (1971) asks: what principles of justice would rational persons choose for the basic structure of their society if they did not know their place within it?

The original position is a thought experiment, not a historical event. The parties behind the veil of ignorance do not know their race, sex, class, talents, conception of the good, or position in society. They know general facts about human psychology, economics, and social organisation, but nothing about their own particular situation. The veil ensures impartiality: since no one knows which position they will occupy, no one can tailor the principles to their own advantage.

Rawls argues that rational agents in this situation would choose two principles:

The first principle (equal liberty). Each person has an equal right to the most extensive system of basic liberties compatible with the same system for all. Basic liberties include freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, and the right to vote.

The second principle (the difference principle). Social and economic inequalities are permitted only if they are (a) attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity, and (b) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.

The first principle has priority over the second: basic liberties cannot be traded for economic gains. The difference principle is Rawls’s most distinctive claim — it does not require equality of outcome but insists that inequality is justified only when the worst-off benefit from it. A society with high inequality is just only if levelling it would make the poorest even poorer.

Justice as fairness

The two principles together constitute “justice as fairness.” The name captures the method: justice is what would be chosen under conditions that are fair — conditions in which no party can exploit advantages that are morally arbitrary (being born rich, talented, or into a dominant group). Rawls calls these advantages morally arbitrary because no one deserves them — they are the result of the natural and social lottery, not of choice or merit.

This challenges both utilitarian and libertarian frameworks. Against utilitarianism: justice as fairness does not permit sacrificing some for the greater good of others — the separateness of persons matters. Against libertarianism: natural talents and inherited advantages are not earned and therefore do not generate entitlements — the distribution of natural gifts is morally arbitrary.

Political liberalism

Political Liberalism (1993) revises the framework in response to a problem Rawls came to regard as fundamental: the fact of reasonable pluralism. In a free society, citizens will hold different and incompatible comprehensive doctrines — religious, philosophical, moral — and this disagreement is not a failure to be overcome but a permanent condition of free institutions.

The question becomes: on what basis can citizens with different comprehensive doctrines agree on principles of justice? Rawls’s answer is the “overlapping consensus” — agreement on political principles for reasons internal to each citizen’s own comprehensive doctrine, not despite their differences but through them. Justice as fairness is recast as a freestanding political conception, not dependent on any particular comprehensive view of the good.

This requires a strict distinction between the political and the comprehensive. The state does not take a position on the truth of any comprehensive doctrine — it provides a framework within which citizens holding different views can cooperate on fair terms. Critics, particularly from the communitarian tradition, have argued that this distinction is unstable: political principles inevitably rest on substantive assumptions about what persons are and what matters, and the claim to neutrality conceals rather than avoids those assumptions.

Where Rawls stops

The communitarian critique — Sandel’s “unencumbered self,” MacIntyre’s tradition-constituted rationality, Taylor’s constitutive community — has been the most sustained philosophical challenge. The objection is not that impartiality is wrong but that the original position’s impartiality requires a conception of the self that no actual person inhabits: a self prior to its attachments, capable of stepping behind every commitment. Rawls’s move to political liberalism was partly a response — recasting the theory as political rather than metaphysical, so that it does not depend on a particular theory of the self. Whether this move succeeds is debated: critics argue that even the political conception carries substantive commitments about what persons are (autonomous choosers) and what matters (individual liberty over communal bonds).

The global question is the other boundary Rawls drew. The Law of Peoples (1999) extends justice to international relations but stops short of global distributive justice — the difference principle applies within societies, not between them. This has been challenged by cosmopolitan theorists (Pogge, Beitz) who argue that the same reasoning that generates the difference principle domestically should generate it globally. Rawls’s response is that peoples, not individuals, are the relevant parties in international justice — a position his own framework makes available but does not compel.

Key works

See also: Sandel · Taylor · MacIntyre · Berlin · Arendt