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RAWLS, JOHN (1921–2002)
John Rawls was perhaps the most prominent and broadly
influential American political philosopher of the 20th century.
Rawls is best known for his 1971 work, A Theory of
Justice, which argues in favor of the institutions of the
modern liberal-democratic welfare state against egalitarian
socialism, on the one hand, and classical liberalism, on the
other hand.
After teaching for a time at Cornell University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rawls joined the
philosophy department at Harvard University in 1962 and
remained there for the rest of his long career. During the
1950s, Rawls’s work eschewed a straightforward analysis
of moral concepts, then popular among philosophers, but
instead attempted to describe a general procedure for moral
decision making along Kantian lines. His work also was
informed by contemporary writings in the theory of rational
choice. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Rawls published
a series of influential papers that would become the
basis of his most celebrated work, A Theory of Justice.
A Theory of Justice declares that justice is the “first
virtue of social institutions” and seeks to identify those
principles of social organization that will create a “realistic
utopia” in which individuals are free to pursue their ends as
they wish, subject only to constraints that everyone has reason
to accept. According to Rawls, the subject matter of a
theory of justice is the “basic structure” of a society—the
system of interlocking legal, political, economic, and social
institutions that assigns to citizens their fundamental rights
and duties and that determines the terms of social cooperation
and the resulting distribution of opportunities and economic
holdings.
Rawls’s conception of justice, which he dubbed “justice
as fairness,” consists of two related principles of justice.
The “first principle,” intended to set constitutional limits on
democratic government, is essentially a restatement of J. S.
Mill and Herbert Spencer’s principles of equal liberty,
which holds that “each person has an equal right to the most
extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all.”
Crucially, however, the liberties Rawls has in mind do not
include those relating to property and contract. The “second
principle,” intended to guarantee the “value” of the basic
liberties he posits, concerns the distribution of opportunities:
wealth, the “social bases of self-respect,” and other
social advantages. He divides this principle into two parts.
The first part, known as the “difference principle,” requires
that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged
so that they are to be of the greatest benefit to the leastadvantaged
members of society.” The second part requires
that “inequalities attached to offices and positions open to
all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”
According to Rawls, the first principle is “lexically prior”
to the second, in that inequalities of opportunity and outcome
may not be addressed before a maximally extensive
system of equal liberties has been established and that the
“rearrangement” of these inequalities must take place
within the constraints of the system of liberty.
Rawls attempts to justify his view of “justice as fairness”
and to rule out competing alternatives by recourse to
a kind of “social contract” thought experiment in the tradition
of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. However, unlike the
neo-Hobbesian models of rational agency embodied in
standard economic models, Rawls, heavily influenced by
the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, depicts people as
distinctly moral agents possessing a “sense of justice” or
“moral capacity” that provides both judgments about
moral matters and motivation to act in accordance with
moral rules, even when this entails the sacrifice of narrow
self-interest. People are understood as rational, in the
economist’s sense, but also as “reasonable.” Rawls’s
thought experiment of choice from the “original position”
is meant to model the way our sense of justice moderates
rational maximization. In the original position, agents are
conceived as maximizing “primary goods”—goods necessary
for the achievement of most any end. But agents also
are conceived as choosing their terms of association from
behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding their talents, opportunities,
economic class, social connections, and so on,
which is meant to model the impartiality and fairness of
reasonable moral beings.
Rawls argues that his two principles of justice are what
agents—so idealized—would choose in the original position.
However, within Rawls’s larger argument, this stands
as only a preliminary justification of his notion of “justice
as fairness.” Principles of justice also must prove stable,
and stability requires that real people would be able to
affirm and comply with them under realistic conditions.
The principles of justice must be in “reflective equilibrium”