John Rawls: Moral and Political Philosophy

John Rawls (b. 1921–d. 2002) was the leading Anglo-American political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century. In his seminal 1971 book, A Theory of Justice (revised edition, Rawls 1999c, cited under Primary Texts), Rawls defends a liberal theory of social and political justice that he called “justice as fairness” as an alternative to utilitarianism, the then-dominant framework. By considering which principles of justice would be chosen from a hypothetical but fair initial choice situation called “the original position,” Rawls presents a variation on the traditional social contract doctrine. He argues that, deprived of specific knowledge of their own situation, the parties in the original position would be forced to reason impartially, and they would agree to principles of justice that required an equal scheme of basic rights and liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and an egalitarian (although not strictly equal) distribution of wealth and positions of authority. These principles are to be used to evaluate the basic structure of society—the system formed by a society’s basic social institutions. Rawls continues to defend these principles of justice and the argument from the original position, but in his second book, Political Liberalism (Rawls 2005, cited under Primary Texts), he presents justice as fairness as an example of a “political conception of justice” (pp. xxix, 11–15). Recognizing the diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines, Rawls argues that a democratic society’s “public reason” should not be tied to any particular comprehensive doctrine, and its stability could be founded only on an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Although Rawls intended his principles of justice to be used in evaluating the basic institutional structure of a society, some theorists argued that the same (or similar) principles should also be used to evaluate the justice of the global order. In The Law of Peoples (Rawls 1999b, cited under Primary Texts), however, Rawls rejects this direct extension. Instead he argues for a far less egalitarian standard of permissible economic inequality among societies and for toleration of certain non-liberal societies that reject the liberal rights he defends domestically (although toleration need not be extended to those who rejected basic human rights). In all three of these areas—defending a liberal conception of justice, modeled on the idea of a social contract, as an alternative to utilitarianism; developing the ideas of democratic justification contained in public reason and a political conception of justice; and introducing a distinction, grounded in a political liberalism itself, between the standards of domestic justice and those of international relations or global justice—Rawls was both controversial and agenda-setting for Anglo-American philosophy. In political philosophy today, his theories continue to represent a baseline against which other theories present themselves.