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John Rawls

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the American philosopher. For the New Zealand actor, see John Rawls (actor).

John Rawls

Born

February
Baltimore, Maryland

Died

November
24,
Lexington, Massachusetts

Awards

Rolf Schock Prizes in Logic and Philosophy (1999)

Era

20th-century philosophy

Region

Western Philosophy

School

Analytic philosophy

Main interests

21,

1921

2002 (aged 81)

Political
Liberalism
Justice
Politics
Social contract theory

philosophy

Notable ideas
Justice
Original position

as

Fairness

Reflective equilibrium
Overlapping consensus
Public reason
Liberal neutrality
Veil of ignorance
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]

John Bordley Rawls (/rlz/;[1] February 21, 1921 November 24, 2002) was an American
philosopher and a figure in moral andpolitical philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University
Professorship at Harvard University and the Fulbright Fellowship atChrist Church, Oxford. Rawls received
both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter
presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "helped a whole generation of
learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."[2]
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was said at the time of its publication to be "the most
important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II"[3] and is now regarded as "one of the
primary texts in political philosophy". [4] His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, [5] takes as its
starting point the argument that "the most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept
and agree to from a fair position". [4] Rawls attempts to determine the principles of social justice by
employing a number of thought experiments such as the famous original position in which everyone is
impartially situated as equals behind a veil of ignorance.[4] He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition
of liberal political philosophy. English philosopherJonathan Wolff argues that "while there might be a
dispute about the second most important political philosopher of the 20th century, there could be no dispute
about the most important: John Rawls".[3]
Contents
[hide]

1 Biography
o

1.1 Early life

1.2 Military Service, 1943-46

1.3 Academic Career

1.4 Later life

2 Contribution to political and moral philosophy

3 Philosophical thought
o

3.1 A Theory of Justice

3.1.1 The Original Position

3.1.2 Reflective Equilibrium

3.1.3 Principles of Justice

3.2 Political Liberalism

3.3 The Law of Peoples

4 Awards and honors

5 Publications
o

5.1 Bibliography

5.2 Articles

5.3 Book chapters

5.4 Reviews

6 See also

7 Notes

8 References

9 External links

Biography[edit]
Early life[edit]
John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland to William Lee Rawls, "one of the most prominent attorneys
in Baltimore",[3] and Anna Abell Stump Rawls. [6] The second of five sons, 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.[3]
Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the "most important events in John's
childhood".[3]
Rawls attended school in Baltimore for a short time before transferring to Kent School,
an Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut. Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls attended Princeton
University, graduating summa cum laude and was accepted into The Ivy Club and the American WhigCliosophic Society.[7] 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. [8]

In 1943, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree and enlisted in the Army in February of that year.[6][9]

Military Service, 1943-46[edit]


During World War II, Rawls served as an infantryman in the Pacific, where he toured New Guinea to win
a Bronze Star;[10] and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and witnessed horrific
scenes.[11]
Following the surrender of Japan, Rawls became part of General MacArthur's occupying army,[6] and was
promoted to Sergeant.[12] But he became disillusioned with the military when he saw the aftermath of the
atomic blast in Hiroshima.[13] He then disobeyed an order to discipline a fellow soldier, believing no
punishment was justified, and was demoted back to private.[14] Disenchanted, he left the military in January
1946.[15]

Academic Career[edit]
In early 1946,[16] Rawls returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy.
Rawls married Margaret Fox, a Brown University graduate, in 1949.[6]
After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950, Rawls taught there until 1952, when he received
a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ Church), 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 1962, he
became a full professor of philosophy at Cornell, and soon 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 Thomas Nagel, Onora
O'Neill, Adrian Piper, Christine Korsgaard, Susan Neiman, Claudia Card, Thomas Pogge, T.M. Scanlon,
Barbara Herman, Joshua Cohen, Thomas E. Hill, Jr.,Gurcharan Das, Samuel Freeman, and Paul Weithman.

Later life[edit]
Rawls seldom gave interviews and, having both a stutter and a "bat-like horror of the limelight", [17] did not
become a public intellectual despite his fame. He instead remained committed mainly to his academic and
family life.[17]
In 1995 he suffered the first of several strokes, severely impeding his ability to continue to work. He was
nevertheless able to complete a book titled The Law of Peoples, the most complete statement of his views
on international justice, and shortly before his death in November 2002 published Justice As Fairness: A
Restatement, a response to criticisms ofA Theory of Justice.

Contribution to political and moral philosophy[edit]


Rawls is noted for his contributions to liberal political philosophy. Among the ideas from Rawls's work that
have received wide attention are:

Justice as Fairness

Original position

Reflective equilibrium

Overlapping consensus

Public reason

Veil of ignorance

There is general agreement in academia that the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 was important to
a revival, following its release, in the academic study of political philosophy. His work has crossed
disciplinary
lines,
receiving
serious
attention
from economists, legal
scholars, political
scientists, sociologists, healthcare resource allocators, and theologians. Rawls has the unique distinction
among contemporary political philosophers of being frequently cited by the courts of law in the United
States and Canada[18]and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom.
[19]

Philosophical thought[edit]
Rawls published three 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]
Rawls's first work, 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. Rawls's intent, rather, was to show that
notions of freedom and equality could be integrated into a seamless unity he called justice as fairness. By
explaining the proper perspective we should take when thinking about justice, Rawls hoped to show the
supposed conflict between freedom and equality to be illusory.
The Original Position[edit]
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 his or her 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 a hypothetical scenario in which a group of persons is set the task of reaching an
agreement about the political and economic structure of a society which they are, once an agreement has
been reached, to occupy. Each individual, however, deliberates behind a "veil of ignorance." Each lacks
knowledge, for example, of his or her gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, and religion.
The only thing a given member knows about himself is that he is in possession of the basic capacities
necessary for him to fully and willfully participate in an enduring system of mutual cooperation; each
knows he can be a member of society. Rawls believes there are two such basic capacities which the
individuals know themselves to possess. First, each individual knows that he has 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 know. It may be, for example, religious or secular, but the individual in
the original position does not know which. Second, each individual understands himself 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 himself, each individual will deliberate in order to design a social structure that will secure
himself maximal advantage. The idea is that proposals we would ordinarily think of as unjust - such as that
blacks or women should not be allowed to hold public office - will not be proposed in the original position
because it would be irrational to propose them.

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, includingThomas Hobbes, John Locke, and JeanJacques Rousseau (each social contractarian constructs his/her initial situation somewhat differently, having
in mind a unique political morality s/he intends the thought experiment to generate). [20] Iain King has
suggested the original position draws on Rawls' 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."[21]
Rawls's aspiration is to have created a thought experiment whereby the preliminary stage of the ordinary
process of deliberation about justice - the stage, that is, in which we make decisions about which features of
persons to consider and which to ignore - is carried to its completion. If he has succeeded, then the original
position may function as a full specification of the moral standpoint we should take when deliberating
about social justice.
Reflective Equilibrium[edit]
Despite the amount of attention received by Rawls's original position, equally if not more important is his
concept of "reflective equilibrium." This latter concept is Rawls's account of how deliberation about
morality in general, but justice in particular, should proceed, and it serves as the metatheoretical frame
within which the concept of the original position is situated.
Reflective equilibrium is essentially a three-step process whereby one (1) identifies a group of considered
judgments about justice (intuitions about justice that strike one as relatively secure, such as that slavery and
religious persecution are unjust), (2) attempts to explain and justify these considered judgments by
discovering what (relatively more abstract) principles of justice can serve as their foundation, and (3)
addresses any lack of fit between the principles one has arrived at and considered judgments about justice
other than the group from which one started.
To give an example: suppose I begin with a considered judgment that a restaurant's denying service to a
person simply because he is black or Jewish is unjust, and proceed to account for this judgment by a
principle which says that discrimination based upon nothing other than race is unjust, or (alternatively) that
from the standpoint of justice, race is a morally irrelevant feature of a person. But then suppose I have
another considered conviction about the justice of affirmative action; let's say I think race is a feature of a
person that institutions of higher learning should take account of in their admissions procedures. If my
conception of justice is to be internally coherent, I will be forced to negotiate the apparent conflict between
the principle of justice I used to account for my initial considered judgment, on the one hand, and the
considered judgment with which the principle conflicts, on the other. Rawls held that there will inevitably
be give and take between a person's first-order judgments about justice and the higher order commitments
that take the form of principles of justice. "Reflective equilibrium," then, is the name both for the ideal state
in which all of a person's considered convictions about justice are in harmony with their more abstract
principles of justice, and for the procedure whereby this state is reached.
There is a sense that Rawls's concept of reflective equilibrium is nothing other than a description of our
common sense method of reasoning about morality. But Rawls's explicit endorsement of this method cut
against the philosophical grain of his time in at least one important respect, for it amounts to a rejection of
the absolute priority of principles on display in a work like Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and
Utopia (1974). In that work, an abstract moral principle introduced at the beginning of the work - roughly,
the plenary right of individuals to self-ownership, property, and contract - is used to bulldoze other, more
concrete moral intuitions, such as that it is unjust for employers to discriminate based on race, or that it is
unjust to allow someone in need of emergency care to die due to their inability to pay for treatment. By
refusing to privilege principles over concrete considered judgments, Rawls's concept of reflective
equilibrium may be interpreted as a reaction against and prophylactic to the principle-heavy arguments of
political philosophers past and present. However, it can be added that the concept of 'reflective equilibrium'

(as well as the expression itself) was originally introduced by Nelson Goodman's "New Riddle of
Induction" in Chapter 3 of Goodman's book Fact, Fiction and Forecast.
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,
[22]
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 libertarianism of Robert 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[23]) 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, the political constitution), a qualification that has been the
source of some controversy and constructive debate (the work of Gerald Cohen).
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".[24] 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".
[25]
Much recent work in political philosophy has asked what justice as fairness might dictate (or indeed,
whether it is very useful at all) for problems of "partial compliance" under "nonideal theory." [citation needed]

Political Liberalism[edit]
In Political 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, Rawls 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 Justicecan 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 it will circumscribe
the social, legal, and political limits of. 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, accordingly, is its insistence that, in order to retain its legitimacy, the
liberal state must commit itself to the "ideal of public reason." This means, roughly, 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. 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 referenda. 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." More notably though, he switches the two parts of the
second principle, so that the difference principle becomes the latter of the three.

The Law of Peoples[edit]


Main article: The Law of Peoples
Although there were passing comments on international affairs in A Theory of Justice, it wasn't 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 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 unfavourable
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. Charles Beitz, for instance, 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 states, unlike citizens, were self-sufficient in the cooperative enterprises that
constitute domestic societies. Although Rawls recognized that aid should be given to governments who 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. Rawls 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 claimed, controversially, 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.

Awards and honors[edit]

Bronze Star for radio work behind enemy lines in World War II.[26]

Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy (1999)

National Humanities Medal (1999)

Asteroid 16561 Rawls is named in his honor

John Rawls is also the subject of A Theory of Justice: The Musical!, an award-nominated musical billed as
an 'all-singing, all-dancing romp through 2,500 years of political philosophy'. The musical premiered at
Oxford in 2013 and was revived for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. [27]

Publications[edit]
Bibliography[edit]

A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.
The revised edition of 1999 incorporates changes that Rawls made for translated editions of A Theory
of Justice. Some Rawls scholars use the abbreviation TJ to refer to this work.

Political Liberalism. The John Dewey Essays in Philosophy, 4. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993. The hardback edition published in 1993 is not identical. The paperback adds a valuable
new introduction and an essay titled "Reply to Habermas." Some Rawls scholars use the
abbreviation PL to refer to this work.

The Law of Peoples: with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited." Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1999. This slim book includes two works; a further development of his
essay entitled "The Law of Peoples" and another entitled "Public Reason Revisited", both published
earlier in his career.

Collected Papers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. This collection of
shorter papers was edited by Samuel Freeman.

Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University


Press, 2000. This collection of lectures was edited by Barbara Herman. It has an introduction on
modern moral philosophy from 16001800 and then lectures on Hume, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel.

Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2001. This shorter
summary of the main arguments of Rawls's political philosophy was edited by Erin Kelly. Many
versions of this were circulated in typescript and much of the material was delivered by Rawls in
lectures when he taught courses covering his own work at Harvard University.

Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University


Press, 2007. Collection of lectures on Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Joseph Butler, J.J.
Rousseau, David Hume, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx, edited by Samuel Freeman.

A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University
Press, 2010. With introduction and commentary by Thomas Nagel, Joshua Cohen, and Robert
Merrihew Adams. Senior thesis, Princeton, 1942. This volume includes a brief late essay by Rawls
entitled On My Religion.

Articles[edit]

"A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the
Moral Worth of Character." Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1950.

"Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics." Philosophical Review (April 1951), 60 (2): 177-197.

"Two Concepts of Rules." Philosophical Review (January 1955), 64 (1):3-32.

"Justice as Fairness." Journal of Philosophy (October 24, 1957), 54 (22): 653-662.

"Justice as Fairness." Philosophical Review (April 1958), 67 (2): 164-194.

"The Sense of Justice." Philosophical Review (July 1963), 72 (3): 281-305.

"Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice" Nomos VI (1963) (in the notes to the second
volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek refers to this article to show that Rawls agreed with
the Lockean conception that what could be just or unjust was the way competition was carried on, not
its results)

"Distributive Justice: Some Addenda." Natural Law Forum (1968), 13: 51-71.

"Reply to Lyons and Teitelman." Journal of Philosophy (October 5, 1972), 69 (18): 556-557.

"Reply to Alexander and Musgrave." Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1974), 88 (4):
633-655.

"Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion." American Economic Review (May 1974), 64 (2): 141146.

"Fairness to Goodness." Philosophical Review (October 1975), 84 (4): 536-554.


"The Independence of Moral Theory." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association (November 1975), 48: 5-22.
"A Kantian Conception of Equality." Cambridge Review (February 1975), 96 (2225): 94-99.
"The Basic Structure as Subject." American Philosophical Quarterly (April 1977), 14 (2): 159165.

"Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory." Journal of Philosophy (September 1980), 77 (9): 515572.

"Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." Philosophy & Public Affairs (Summer 1985), 14
(3): 223-251.

"The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus." Oxford Journal for Legal Studies (Spring 1987), 7 (1): 125.

"The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good." Philosophy & Public Affairs (Fall 1988), 17 (4):
251-276.

"The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus." New York University Law Review (May
1989), 64 (2): 233-255.

"Roderick Firth: His Life and Work." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March 1991),
51 (1): 109-118.

"The Law of Peoples." Critical Inquiry (Fall 1993), 20 (1): 36-68.

"Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas." Journal of Philosophy (March 1995), 92 (3):132-180.

"The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Chicago Law Review (1997), 64 (3): 765-807. [PRR]

Book chapters[edit]

"Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice." In Carl J. Friedrich and John W. Chapman,
eds., Nomos, VI: Justice, pp. 98125. Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal
Philosophy. New York: Atherton Press, 1963.

"Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play." In Sidney Hook, ed., Law and Philosophy: A
Symposium, pp. 318. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Proceedings of the 6th Annual
New York University Institute of Philosophy.

"Distributive Justice." In Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and
Society. Third Series, pp. 5882. London: Blackwell; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967.

"The Justification of Civil Disobedience." In Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience: Theory
and Practice, pp. 240255. New York: Pegasus Books, 1969.

"Justice as Reciprocity." In Samuel Gorovitz, ed., Utilitarianism: John Stuart Mill: With Critical
Essays, pp. 242268. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

"Author's Note." In Thomas Schwartz, ed., Freedom and Authority: An Introduction to Social and
Political Philosophy, p. 260. Encino & Belmont, California: Dickenson, 1973.

"Distributive Justice." In Edmund S. Phelps, ed., Economic Justice: Selected Readings, pp. 319
362. Penguin Modern Economics Readings. Harmondsworth & Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973.

"Personal Communication, January 31, 1976." In Thomas Nagel's "The Justification of Equality."
Critica (April 1978), 10 (28): 9n4.

"The Basic Liberties and Their Priority." In Sterling M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on
Human Values, III (1982), pp. 187. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982.

"Social Unity and Primary Goods." In Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds., Utilitarianism
and Beyond, pp. 159185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des
Sciences de l'Homme, 1982.

"Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy." In Eckhart Forster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deductions:
The Three Critiques and the Opus postumum, pp. 81113, 253-256. Stanford Series in Philosophy.
Studies in Kant and German Idealism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Reviews[edit]

Review of Axel Hgerstrm's Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals (C.D. Broad,
tr.). Mind (July 1955), 64 (255):421-422.

Review of Stephen Toulmin's An Examination of the


Ethics (1950). Philosophical Review (October 1951), 60 (4): 572-580.

Place

of

Reason

in

Review of A. Vilhelm Lundstedt's Legal Thinking Revised. Cornell Law Quarterly (1959), 44: 169.

Review of Raymond Klibansky, ed., Philosophy in Mid-Century: A Survey. Philosophical


Review (January 1961), 70 (1): 131-132.

Review of Richard B. Brandt, ed., Social Justice (1962). Philosophical Review (July 1965), 74(3):
406-409.

See also[edit]

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

List of American philosophers

List of liberal theorists

Philosophy of economics

A Theory of Justice: The Musical!

Notes[edit]
1.

Jump up^ "Rawls" entry in Random House Dictionary, Random House, 2013.

2.

3.

Jump up^ "The National Medal Of The Arts And The National Humanities Medal".
Clinton4.nara.gov. 1999-09-29. Retrieved 2010-02-26.
^ Jump up to:a b c d e Gordon, David (2008-07-28) Going Off the Rawls, The American Conservative

4.

^ Jump up to:a b c Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, "Rawls, John," Cambridge University Press,
pp. 774775.

5.

Jump up^ Kordana, Kevin & Tabachnick, David (2006). "On Belling the Cat: Rawls and
Corrective Justice". Virginia Law Review 92: 1279.

6.

^ Jump up to:a b c d Freeman, 2010:xix

7.

Jump up^ "Daily Princetonian 12 April 1940 Princeton Periodicals". Theprince.princeton.edu.


1940-04-12. Retrieved 2013-01-31.

8.

Jump up^ Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, "John Rawls: On My Religion", Times Literary
Supplement, 18 March 2009

9.

Jump up^ Article by Iain King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History
Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

10.

Jump up^ "His first experience of combat was in New Guinea a country which saw fighting for
almost the whole duration of the Pacific campaign where he won a Bronze Star." From article by Iain
King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20
November 2014.

11.

Jump up^ "One soldier in a dugout close to Rawls stood up and deliberately removed his helmet to
take a bullet to the head, choosing to die rather than endure the constant barrage.... Later Rawls confided the
whole experience was'particularly terrible'..." From an article by Iain King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls,
published in Military History Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

12.

Jump up^ From article by Iain King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History
Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

13.

Jump up^ "The total obliteration of physical infrastructure, and the even more horrific human toll,
affected him deeply... and the fact that the destruction had been deliberately inflicted by his own side, was
profoundly unsettling. He wrote that the scenes still haunted him 50 years later." From an article by Iain
King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20
November 2014.

14.

Jump up^ From article by Iain King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History
Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

15.

Jump up^ From an article by Iain King, titled Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History
Monthly, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

16.

Jump up^ Date from Thinker at War: Rawls, published in Military History Monthly, 13 June 2014,
accessed 20 November 2014.

17.

^ Jump up to:a b Rogers, 27.09.02

18.

Jump up^ "Fair Opportunity to Participate". The Canadian Political Science Review. June 2009.

19.

Jump up^ "They Work For You search: "John Rawls"". Theyworkforyou.com. Retrieved2010-0226.

20.

Jump up^ Nussbaum, Martha; Frontiers of Justice; Harvard U Press; Cambridge, MA; 2006;
Kindle location 1789

21.

Jump up^ "Deciding what this new (Japanese) society should look like was the task of the
Supreme Command for the Allied Powers, and Rawls took this question what should the rules of a society
be back to the US. But only in 1971 did he come up with a comprehensive answer. His theory starts by
imagining away all that had gone before, just as the past had been erased in Hiroshima." Taken from Thinker
at War: Rawls, published in Military History Magazine, 13 June 2014, accessed 20 November 2014.

22.

Jump up^ Rawls 2001, pp. 114

23.

Jump up^ Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. pp. Chapter 7.

24.

Jump up^ Rawls 1971, pp. 397

25.

Jump up^ Rawls 1971, pp. 216

26.

Jump up^ Page 12 of 'John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice' by Thomas Pogge, 2007.

27.

Jump up^ "Oxford / News / Colleges / PPE finalists create revision musical". Cherwell.org. 201210-03. Retrieved 2013-01-31.

References[edit]

Freeman, S. (2007) Rawls (Routledge, Abingdon)

Freeman, Samuel (2009) "Original Position" (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [1])

Rawls, J. (1993/1996/2005) Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, New York)

Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice (Original ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674017722.

Rawls, John (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press. ISBN 9780674005112.

Rogers, B. (27.09.02) "Obituary: John Rawls" [2]

Tampio, N. (2011) "A Defense of Political Constructivism" (Contemporary Political Theory, [3])

Wenar, Leif (2008) "John Rawls" (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [4])

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