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Thinkers

John Rawls

1921–2002, Baltimore and Harvard

Political liberalism

Design society as if you didn't know who in it you'd be.

Justice as fairnessThe original positionVeil of ignoranceThe difference principle
“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”
A Theory of Justice, §1

The life

Rawls grew up in Baltimore. Two of his younger brothers caught infections from him in childhood and died, one from diphtheria and one from pneumonia. He pointed to this as an early and permanent lesson in the arbitrariness of fortune.

He served as an infantryman in the Pacific during the Second World War, was in New Guinea and the Philippines, and was in Japan shortly after Hiroshima. He refused a promotion, left the army as a private, and later wrote that the atomic bombings were not justified.

He took his doctorate at Princeton and taught at Harvard from 1962 until retirement. He was quiet, stammered, avoided publicity, and worked on the same set of problems for fifty years. A Theory of Justice took him more than a decade.

What shaped the ideas

By the 1960s, political philosophy in the English-speaking world was widely considered dead, killed by logical positivism's claim that value judgements were not statements of fact and by the dominance of utilitarianism in policy.

Rawls revived it with a single move: instead of asking what maximises welfare, ask what principles people would agree to if they could not rig the rules in their own favour. A Theory of Justice arrived in 1971, into an argument about civil rights, Vietnam and the welfare state, and reset the field.

Core arguments

  1. 01

    The original position

    Fair principles are the ones we would choose from a fair starting point.

    Real bargaining reflects existing advantages: the strong get better terms. To find principles that are fair rather than merely agreed, model a choice made without those advantages, and treat whatever would be chosen there as what justice requires.

  2. 02

    The veil of ignorance

    Choose the rules without knowing your class, race, sex, talents or beliefs.

    If you do not know which position you will occupy, you cannot tailor the rules to favour yourself. Self-interest is then forced to do the work of impartiality, which is why the device produces fairness without requiring anyone to be selfless.

  3. 03

    The two principles

    Equal basic liberties first; then fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle.

    Behind the veil you would secure basic liberties first, since you might hold any religion or none, and you would not gamble them for economic gain. You would then permit inequalities only where positions are genuinely open to all and where the inequality improves the position of the least advantaged, because you might turn out to be them.

  4. 04

    Reflective equilibrium

    Adjust principles and judgements against each other until they cohere.

    Neither abstract principles nor gut reactions are authoritative on their own. When a principle yields a conclusion you find intolerable, such as permitting slavery, that is evidence against the principle; when a considered judgement conflicts with a principle you find compelling, the judgement may need revising. Justification is the fit achieved between them.

Commonly got wrong

  • The veil of ignorance is not a claim that anyone is ignorant, or a historical contract. It is a device of representation, a way of modelling what fairness requires, and Rawls says so explicitly.
  • The difference principle does not require equality. It permits inequalities, sometimes large ones, provided they actually improve the position of the worst off.
  • Rawls is not a straightforward egalitarian about outcomes. Liberty has lexical priority, meaning it cannot be traded away for economic gains no matter how large.

Works

  • A Theory of Justice 1971, revised 1999

    The original position, the veil, the two principles. It restarted political philosophy.

  • Political Liberalism 1993

    How a society of people with irreconcilable moral and religious views can still be stable and just.

  • The Law of Peoples 1999

    Extends the framework to relations between societies, and disappoints most of his followers by not extending the difference principle globally.

  • Justice as Fairness: A Restatement 2001

    His own late summary, and considerably clearer than the original.

A Theory of Justice, sections 1 to 4 for the setup, then 11 to 13 for the two principles. Or the Restatement, which is friendlier.

Why they still get taught

He made distributive justice a central question again and gave it a vocabulary. Nozick's libertarian reply, Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach, and the communitarian critiques of Sandel and MacIntyre are all responses to him.

Chapters