John Rawls

John Rawls was an American philosopher whose book A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy in the English-speaking world. He asked what principles of justice free and equal people would choose if they did not know what position they would occupy in society, and answered that they would protect basic liberties for everyone and allow inequalities only when they benefit the worst off. His work is the starting point for most modern debates about liberal democracy, fairness and the welfare state.

Rawls was born on 21 February 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, the second of five sons of a successful lawyer and a mother active in the League of Women Voters. His childhood was marked by tragedy: in 1928 he caught diphtheria and a younger brother who visited his sickroom was infected and died, and the following winter another brother caught pneumonia from him and also died. Rawls developed a stammer that stayed with him for life, and he avoided public attention even when famous.

He was educated at Kent School, an Episcopalian boarding school in Connecticut, and at Princeton University, graduating in 1943. As a student he was devoutly religious and considered training for the priesthood. He then served as an infantryman in the Pacific during the Second World War, in New Guinea and the Philippines, and with the occupation forces in Japan, where he saw the devastation of Hiroshima soon after the atomic bombing. The war, and what he learned of the Holocaust, destroyed his Christian faith. He left the army in 1946 as a private, having been demoted for refusing to punish a fellow soldier.

Rawls returned to Princeton and took a doctorate in moral philosophy in 1950. A Fulbright fellowship took him to Oxford in 1952–53, where he met the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart and the political theorist Isaiah Berlin. He taught at Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving in 1962 to Harvard, where he stayed for the rest of his career. During the Vietnam War he opposed the draft deferment that protected students like his own while poorer young men were sent to fight, and the war sharpened his thinking about civil disobedience and the failings of American democracy.

For nearly twenty years he worked on a single long project, circulating drafts and articles such as "Justice as Fairness" (1958). The result, A Theory of Justice, appeared in 1971.

Rawls wanted an alternative to utilitarianism, the dominant theory in English-speaking philosophy since Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which judges a society by the total or average happiness it produces. He objected that this could justify sacrificing some people for the greater good of others. Instead he returned to the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and especially Immanuel Kant.

His central device was the "original position". Imagine people choosing the basic rules of their society from behind a "veil of ignorance": they do not know whether they will be rich or poor, talented or not, which race or sex they will be, or what religion or idea of the good life they will hold. Rawls argued that, unable to rig the rules in their own favour, they would choose two principles. The first gives each person the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all, such as freedom of speech, conscience and political participation. The second allows social and economic inequalities only if positions are open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if the inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, which he called the "difference principle". The first principle has priority: liberty may not be traded for economic gain.

Rawls also described the method of "reflective equilibrium", in which people test general principles against their considered judgements about particular cases, adjusting each until they fit together.

The book drew huge attention and criticism. His Harvard colleague Robert Nozick replied in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) that redistribution violates people's rights to what they have justly acquired. Communitarian critics such as Michael Sandel argued that Rawls pictured individuals as detached from the communities that form them. Others, like G. A. Cohen, thought his theory tolerated too much inequality.

Rawls revised his views in Political Liberalism (1993). He accepted that free societies will always contain people with deeply different religious and moral beliefs, and that a theory of justice could not require everyone to accept one philosophy of life. Instead, he argued, citizens can reach an "overlapping consensus" on political principles from within their different world-views, and should justify laws by "public reason" that others could accept. In The Law of Peoples (1999) he extended his ideas to international relations, defending a society of decent peoples and duties of assistance to burdened societies, though rejecting a global version of the difference principle. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement appeared in 2001.

In 1995 Rawls suffered the first of several strokes, which limited his work. In 1999 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton. He died of heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, near Boston, on 24 November 2002, aged 81.

Rawls is widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, and a central figure of analytic philosophy. His work shaped debates in law, economics and public policy, and the veil of ignorance has become a familiar thought experiment far outside universities. His students and those he influenced, including Thomas Nagel, Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, Joshua Cohen and Thomas Pogge, carried his ideas in many directions, while critics in feminist philosophy, such as Susan Moller Okin, pressed him on justice within the family.