(Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, publis...)
Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.
(The premier political philosopher of his day, John Rawls,...)
The premier political philosopher of his day, John Rawls, in three decades of teaching at Harvard, has had a profound influence on the way philosophical ethics is approached and understood today. This book brings together the lectures that inspired a generation of students - and the regeneration of moral philosophy. It invites readers to learn from the most noted exemplars of modern moral philosophy with the inspired guidance of one of contemporary philosophy's most noteworthy practitioners and teachers.
(This book originated as lectures for a course on politica...)
This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard in the 1980s. He offers a broad overview of his main lines of thought and also explores specific issues never before addressed in any of his writings.
(This book consists of two parts: "The Law of Peoples," a ...)
This book consists of two parts: "The Law of Peoples," a major reworking of a much shorter article by the same name published in 1993, and the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," first published in 1997. Taken together, they are the culmination of more than fifty years of reflection on liberalism and on some of the most pressing problems of our times by John Rawls.
(John Rawls's work on justice has drawn more commentary an...)
John Rawls's work on justice has drawn more commentary and aroused wider attention than any other work in moral or political philosophy in the twentieth century. Rawls is the author of two major treatises, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993); it is said that A Theory of Justice revived political philosophy in the English-speaking world.
(This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as f...)
This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society, a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines - religious, philosophical, and moral - coexist within the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines?
(Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls'...)
Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.
Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: With "On My Religion"
(John Rawls never published anything about his own religio...)
John Rawls never published anything about his own religious beliefs, but after his death, two texts were discovered which shed light on the subject. The present volume includes these two texts, together with an Introduction that discusses their relation to Rawls’s published work, and an essay that places them theological context.
John Rawls was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system.
Background
John Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father William Lee Rawls was a prominent lawyer, his mother Anna Abel Stump Rawls was a chapter president of the League of Women Voters.
Although his family was of comfortable means, his youth was twice marked by tragedy. In two successive years, his two younger brothers contracted an infectious disease from him - diphtheria in one case and pneumonia in the other - and died. Rawls’s vivid sense of the arbitrariness of fortune may have stemmed in part from this early experience. His remaining, older brother attended Princeton for undergraduate studies and was a great athlete.
Education
Rawls studied at the Calvert School in Baltimore. After attending an Episcopalian preparatory school, Kent School, in Connecticut in 1939, he entered Princeton University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1943. He enlisted in the army later that year and served with the infantry in the South Pacific until his discharge in 1945. He returned to Princeton in 1946 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in moral philosophy in 1950.
While Rawls studied at Princeton, he was influenced by Wittgenstein's student Norman Malcolm.
In 1952 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ Church), where he worked with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin, and Stuart Hampshire.
Rawls’s doctoral dissertation (1950) already showed, however, that he would not be content to deconstruct our impulse to ask metaphysical questions; instead, he devoted himself to constructive philosophical tasks.
John Rawls taught at Princeton in 1950-1952. From 1953 to 1959 he was an assistant, then associate professor at Cornell University. From 1960 to 1962 Rawls worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally, at Harvard University, where he was appointed James Bryant Conant University Professor in 1979.
In 1963, he authored a chapter titled, "Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice" for the book, "Nomos, VI: Justice," Yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. In 1967, he authored the chapter titled, "Distributive Justice" in the Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman book titled, "Philosophy, Politics, and Society." The following year, he wrote the article, "Distributive Justice: Some Addenda."
In 1971, he authored "A Theory of Justice," which was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. This is regarded as one of his most important works on political philosophy and ethics.
In November 1974, he wrote the article titled, "Reply to Alexander and Musgrave" in the "Quarterly Journal of Economics." The same year, he also published "Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion" in the "American Economic Review."
In 1993, he came out with an updated version of A Theory of Justice titled "Political Liberalism." The work was published by the Columbia University Press. The same year, he authored the article titled, "The Law of Peoples," which was published in the "Critical Inquiry."
In 2001, he published "Justice as Fairness: A Restatement," in response to criticism of his book, A Theory of Justice. The book presented a shorter summary of the philosophies that was edited by Erin Kelly.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls defends a conception of "justice as fairness." He holds that an adequate account of justice cannot be derived from utilitarianism, because that doctrine is consistent with intuitively undesirable forms of government in which the greater happiness of a majority is achieved by neglecting the rights and interests of a minority. Reviving the notion of a social contract, Rawls argues that justice consists of the basic principles of government that free and rational individuals would agree to in a hypothetical situation of perfect equality. In order to ensure that the principles chosen are fair, Rawls imagines a group of individuals who have been made ignorant of the social, economic, and historical circumstances from which they come, as well as their basic values and goals, including their conception of what constitutes a "good life." Situated behind this "veil of ignorance," they could not be influenced by self-interested desires to benefit some social groups (i.e., the groups they belong to) at the expense of others. Thus they would not know any facts about their race, sex, age, religion, social or economic class, wealth, income, intelligence, abilities, talents, and so on.
John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do.
He was a leading American philosopher in moral and political philosophy whose work in political philosophy is dubbed as Rawlsianism.
"A Theory of Justice" is one of his seminal works and magnum opus that was widely hailed during its time of publication as ‘'the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II'.
In 1999, he received the Schock Prize for his work in "Logic and Philosophy."
In 1999, he was the recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
(This book originated as lectures for a course on politica...)
2001
Religion
Before World War II, Rawls had been a committed Episcopalian. His undergraduate thesis had been about "Sin and Faith," and the young Rawls had even considered joining the priesthood. But his experiences in the Pacific and in post-war Japan shattered his certainties.
As an old man, he mused that if ever he needed evidence that God was not enough, he remembered the words of a military chaplain who had told the American soldiers that God would "shield them" but not the Japanese (Rawls later wrote that he "upbraided" the pastor for distorting the Bible).
Then he would recall what he had seen in Hiroshima, the news he had heard about Auschwitz while traveling on a train in 1945, and the arbitrariness with which several of his fellow soldiers had been killed, one of them dying in his arms. God, it seemed, had been absent.
Demobilized from the Pacific in 1946 to start a doctorate in moral philosophy back at Princeton, Rawls was a very different person to the God-fearing optimist who had volunteered for service. Religion and the Army had failed him. In their place, he had developed a thirst for justice - or, more accurately, a thirst to discover what justice was.
His worldview had been shaped by a collection of vivid, shocking, and deeply personal experiences, all of them from his wartime service. The course of the rest of his life was set.
Politics
In the 1960s, Rawls spoke out against America's military actions in Vietnam. The Vietnam conflict impelled Rawls to analyze the defects in the American political system that led it to prosecute so ruthlessly what he saw as an unjust war and to consider how citizens could conscientiously resist their government's aggressive policies.
Views
John Rawls' first book, A Theory of Justice (1971), revitalized the social-contract tradition, using it to articulate and defend a detailed vision of egalitarian liberalism. In Political Liberalism (1993), he recast the role of political philosophy, accommodating it to the effectively permanent "reasonable pluralism" of religious, philosophical, and other comprehensive doctrines or worldviews that characterize modern societies. He explains how philosophers can characterize public justification and the legitimate, democratic use of collective coercive power while accepting that pluralism.
The theory of Justice sets out and defends the principles of Justice as Fairness. Rawls takes the basic structure of society as his subject matter and utilitarianism as his principal opponent. Part One of the Theory of Justice designs a social-contract-type thought experiment, the Original Position, and argues that parties in the Original Position will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and various other views. In order to understand the argument from the Original Position, one must pay special attention to the motivation of the parties to the Original Position, which is philosophically stipulated and provided with a Kantian interpretation. Part Two of Theory of Justice checks the fit between the principles of Justice as Fairness and our more concrete considered views about just institutions, thereby helping move us towards a reflective equilibrium that supports those principles. Part Three of Theory of Justice addresses the stability of a society organized around Justice as Fairness, arguing that there will be an important congruence in such a society between people’s views about justice and what they value. By the time he wrote Political Liberalism, however, Rawls had decided that inconsistency in the Theory of Justice called for recasting the argument for stability. In other ways, the argument of the Theory of Justice rested on important simplifications, which had the effect of setting aside questions about international justice, disability, and familial justice. Rawls turned to these "problems of extension," as he called them, at the end of his career.
Quotations:
"Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgments are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic."
"A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place."
"The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have."
"The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into a society in some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts."
"The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice."
"No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society."
"In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class."
"An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice."
"Justice as fairness provides what we want."
"The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well."
"Ideally citizens are to think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think is most reasonable to enact."
"Justice is happiness according to virtue."
"Liberal constitutional democracy is supposed to ensure that each citizen is free and equal and protected by basic rights and liberties."
"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise, laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust."
"The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."
Membership
John Rawls was a member of the American Philosophical Association (executive committee Eastern division 1959-1962, vice president 1973, president 1974), American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for Political and Legal Philosophy (president 1970-1972), American Philosophical Society.
Executive committee Eastern division 1959-1962, vice president 1973, president 1974.
American Philosophical Association
,
United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
President 1970-1972
American Association for Political and Legal Philosophy
,
United States
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
Personality
Although Rawls played baseball, he was, in later life at least, excessively modest about his success at that or at any other endeavor.
In the autumn of 1945, Rawls passed through Hiroshima after it had been destroyed by an atomic bomb. The total obliteration of physical infrastructure, and the even more horrific human toll, affected him deeply. The scale of the tragedy, 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.
This famous American political philosopher did not like giving interviews and was not comfortable with limelight.
Physical Characteristics:
In 1928, when he was barely seven years old, he suffered from diphtheria. The next year, he was struck with pneumonia.
In 1995, he suffered from a series of strokes, after which he could no longer work.
Quotes from others about the person
"Rawls almost singlehandedly … revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate helped the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one." - former President of the United States Bill Clinton.
Interests
Moral and political philosophy, philosophical analysis
Philosophers & Thinkers
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes
Sport & Clubs
baseball
Connections
John Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox on June 28, 1949. The couple had four children together: Anne Warfield, Robert Lee, Alexander Emory, and Elizabeth Fox.
