John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons of William Lee Rawls, a prominent attorney, and Anna Abell Stump Rawls, who was active in the local movement for women's voting rights ^[1]. The household was comfortable and well connected in Baltimore's professional circles, but Rawls's childhood was marked by two losses that acquaintances later linked to his lifelong preoccupation with luck and unearned advantage. Two of his younger brothers died of infectious diseases, diphtheria and pneumonia, contracted from John himself, who survived both illnesses ^[2].

Any reader asking who was John Rawls before the famous books finds a fairly conventional upbringing for a boy of his class. He attended school in Baltimore and then the Kent School, an Episcopal preparatory school in Connecticut. In 1939 he entered Princeton University, where he first grew serious about philosophy. He also developed, for a time, a strong interest in theology and considered studying for the Episcopal priesthood ^[1].

Rawls graduated from Princeton in 1943 with highest honors. His senior thesis, a study of sin and faith, showed a religious earnestness that would not survive the next two years. The war that followed changed both his plans and his beliefs ^[2].

After graduating, Rawls enlisted in the United States Army and served as an infantryman in the Pacific theater. He saw service in New Guinea and the Philippines, and after Japan's surrender he was part of the occupying force, where he witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima ^[2]. The experience left deep marks. Rawls later wrote publicly that the bombings of Japanese cities were grave wrongs, an unusual position for an American veteran of that campaign to state in print ^[3].

The war also ended his religious ambitions. Rawls said in a short autobiographical essay, published after his death as On My Religion, that the ordeal of the war, including the death of comrades and knowledge of the Holocaust, made orthodox Christian doctrine impossible for him to accept ^[3]. He declined the offer of a commission as an officer and left the Army in 1946 as a private.

He returned to Princeton for doctoral study in moral philosophy and completed his PhD in 1950 with a dissertation on procedures for assessing the ethical worth of character and actions ^[1]. A Fulbright fellowship took him to Oxford in 1952, where the seminars of H. L. A. Hart and conversations with Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire sharpened his sense of how rigorous work in political theory could be done ^[2]. Teaching posts followed at Princeton, Cornell, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before Harvard hired him in 1962. He remained on the Harvard faculty for the rest of his working life, eventually holding a University Professorship, the school's highest academic rank ^[4].

Rawls spent nearly two decades refining the ideas that appeared in 1971 as A Theory of Justice, published by Harvard University Press. The book's core proposal, which he called justice as fairness, asked readers to imagine choosing the basic rules of society from an original position behind a veil of ignorance: no one knows their own wealth, talents, race, sex, or conception of the good life ^[5]. Rawls argued that rational people in that situation would agree on two principles. The first guarantees each person an equal scheme of basic liberties. The second permits social and economic inequalities only when they are attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity and, under the famous difference principle, only when they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society ^[5].

The argument was a direct challenge to utilitarianism, then the dominant framework in Anglophone moral philosophy, which Rawls charged with failing to take seriously the separateness of persons. It also revived the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant in a form abstract enough to answer modern objections ^[1]. The book's method mattered as much as its conclusions. Rawls proposed testing principles against considered moral judgments and adjusting both until they reached what he called reflective equilibrium, a procedure philosophers still use across many fields ^[5].

Among John Rawls facts, the reception of the book is one of the most striking. A dense work of academic philosophy running to roughly 600 pages sold in the hundreds of thousands, was translated into more than twenty languages, and generated a secondary literature that runs to thousands of books and articles ^[4]. Economists, legal scholars, and political scientists engaged it, and critics from Robert Nozick on the libertarian right to communitarian and Marxist writers on other flanks built careers partly on answering it ^[6].

Rawls did not treat his 1971 book as a finished monument. Criticism, especially the objection that his theory quietly presupposed one controversial view of the good life, pushed him to rethink its foundations. The result was Political Liberalism, published by Columbia University Press in 1993 ^[6]. There he asked how a just and stable society is possible when its citizens are permanently divided among reasonable but incompatible religious, moral, and philosophical doctrines. His answer was that political principles must be justifiable through public reason, on grounds all reasonable citizens can accept, and can be supported by an overlapping consensus among different comprehensive views ^[6].

He extended the framework to relations among peoples in The Law of Peoples (1999), which set out principles for foreign policy, human rights, and assistance to burdened societies, and which drew criticism from some of his own admirers for stopping short of global egalitarianism ^[1]. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), assembled with the help of former students, gave his final, compressed presentation of the whole theory. His Harvard lecture courses were also published, appearing as Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000) and Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2007) ^[4].

Honors accumulated late but steadily. In 1999 Rawls received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton, who credited his work with helping to revive faith in democracy itself, and the same year he won the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ^[7].

In 1949 Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox, a graduate of Brown University known as Mard, and the couple spent their first summer together indexing a book on Nietzsche, an experience Rawls joked cured him of ever indexing his own books ^[2]. They raised four children, Anne, Robert, Alexander, and Elizabeth, and settled in Lexington, Massachusetts, within commuting distance of Harvard ^[4].

Colleagues and students consistently described a man whose personal manner contradicted his towering reputation: shy, modest, prone to a stammer, and generous with his time. He avoided publicity, rarely gave interviews, and declined most invitations to comment on current affairs, believing that a philosopher's contribution came through careful argument rather than punditry ^[4]. His graduate students at Harvard included many who became leading philosophers in their own right, among them Thomas Nagel, Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Samuel Scheffler, and his teaching is often cited alongside his writing as central to John Rawls achievements ^[2].

Outside philosophy he was a keen sailor and hiker in his younger years, and friends recalled his lifelong interest in baseball. He remained a Democrat in his personal politics but kept partisan commitments out of the classroom ^[2].

Rawls retired from teaching at Harvard in 1991 but kept writing. In 1995 he suffered the first of several strokes, which slowed his work severely. With the steady assistance of his wife and of former students, he nonetheless completed The Law of Peoples and the restatement of justice as fairness during these years ^[4].

His last decade was spent quietly in Lexington. Even as illness limited him, editions of his collected papers appeared in 1999, and scholars around the world marked his achievement with conferences and festschriften. Any John Rawls biography must note the unusual arc of these years: a philosopher who had transformed his discipline lived to see that transformation acknowledged everywhere while personally shunning nearly all of the attention ^[1].

John Rawls died of heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2002, at the age of 81. Obituaries in major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic described him as the most important political philosopher of his century ^[4].

Few academic books have moved from seminar rooms into courtrooms, legislatures, and constitutions as thoroughly as A Theory of Justice. The difference principle shaped debates over taxation and the welfare state; the idea of public reason informs arguments about religion in politics; and reflective equilibrium became a standard method in ethics and beyond ^[5]. Judges and legal theorists cite Rawls when reasoning about equality and basic rights, and development economists have drawn on his focus on the least advantaged ^[6].

Criticism has been part of the legacy from the start. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered him from a libertarian standpoint, communitarians such as Michael Sandel questioned his picture of the self, feminist philosophers including Susan Moller Okin pressed his framework on justice within the family, and Amartya Sen and others challenged his reliance on primary goods rather than capabilities ^[6]. That so many rival positions define themselves against Rawls is itself a measure of his standing.

His papers are held in the Harvard University Archives, and his books remain in print in dozens of languages. More than fifty years after its publication, A Theory of Justice is still the common reference point for arguments about what a fair society owes its members, and Rawls's insistence that institutions be justifiable to the people who live under them continues to set the terms of the field he rebuilt ^[1].