John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls was the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. His book A Theory of Justice (1971) revived the social-contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, and gave liberal democracy its most systematic philosophical defence. Its central idea — justice as fairness — holds that the principles of a just society are those that free and equal persons would agree to in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance”, not knowing what place in society they would occupy. Rawls argued that such persons would choose two principles: equal basic liberties for all, and the difference principle, which permits social and economic inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged. Later, in Political Liberalism (1993), he asked how a society deeply divided by religious and moral disagreement could be stable and just. His work transformed analytic philosophy (Analytic Philosophy), which had long neglected political questions, and shaped law, economics and public policy.

Life

Rawls was born on 21 February 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons of a lawyer and a mother active in the League of Women Voters. Two of his younger brothers died of illnesses — diphtheria and pneumonia — caught from him, a tragedy that left him with a lifelong stammer. He studied at Princeton, where his undergraduate thesis was a theological essay on sin and faith, and considered becoming an Episcopal priest. From 1943 to 1945 he served as an infantryman in New Guinea, the Philippines and occupied Japan; the war, the Holocaust and the sight of Hiroshima’s ruins destroyed his orthodox faith. He returned to Princeton for his PhD (1950), spent a year at Oxford (1952–53) with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, and taught at Cornell and MIT before moving to Harvard in 1962, where he taught until 1991. Shy, modest and a devoted teacher, he spent nearly twenty years writing A Theory of Justice. After a series of strokes from 1995, he died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 24 November 2002.

Justice as fairness

Rawls began from a dissatisfaction with utilitarianism, the dominant moral and political theory in the English-speaking world since Bentham and Mill. Utilitarianism holds that a society is just when it maximises total (or average) welfare. But this, Rawls argued, “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”: it treats society as one great individual, permitting the sacrifice of some for the greater gains of others. “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”

His alternative was a hypothetical contract. Imagine people choosing the basic principles that will govern their society — its constitution, its economy, its distribution of rights, opportunities, income and wealth. To ensure that their choice is fair, place them in an original position behind a veil of ignorance: they do not know their race, sex, class, natural talents, intelligence, strength, religion or conception of the good life, nor even the generation they belong to. They know general facts about society and human psychology, and they want more rather than less of the primary goods — rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth and the social bases of self-respect — whatever else they want.

What would they choose? Not utilitarianism, Rawls argued: since they cannot know whether they would be among those sacrificed, and since the stakes are their whole lives, they would reason cautiously, by the maximin rule — choose the arrangement whose worst outcome is best. They would choose:

1. The liberty principle: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme for all — political liberty, freedom of speech, assembly, conscience and thought, freedom of the person, the right to hold property, freedom from arbitrary arrest.
2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) they are attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b) they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society — the difference principle.

The first principle takes priority over the second: liberty cannot be traded for economic gain.

The difference principle and desert

The difference principle allows inequality, but only if it works for the worst-off: a doctor may be paid more than a cleaner if this arrangement, through incentives, makes the cleaner better off than under strict equality. Rawls’s radical claim was that no one deserves their natural talents or the family into which they are born; these are “morally arbitrary” from a moral point of view, the outcome of a “natural lottery”. A just society treats the distribution of natural talents as “a common asset” and arranges institutions so that the fortunate gain only in ways that also help the unfortunate.

Reflective equilibrium

Rawls’s method was not to deduce principles from self-evident axioms but to seek reflective equilibrium — a state in which our general principles and our considered judgments about particular cases (that slavery is unjust, that religious persecution is wrong) have been adjusted to one another until they cohere. The original position is a device for representing conditions we already accept as fair.

Political Liberalism

In Political Liberalism (1993) Rawls recognised that A Theory of Justice had presented justice as fairness as part of a comprehensive moral doctrine that not all reasonable citizens could accept. Modern democracies are marked by “the fact of reasonable pluralism”: citizens hold different religious, philosophical and moral doctrines, and will continue to do so. A just and stable society requires an overlapping consensus — a political conception of justice that adherents of different comprehensive doctrines can each endorse from their own point of view — and public reason: when deciding fundamental political questions, citizens should offer one another reasons that all could reasonably accept. The Law of Peoples (1999) extended the theory to international relations.

Critics

Rawls’s work provoked an enormous literature. From the libertarian right, his Harvard colleague Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), argued that any pattern of distribution would be upset by free exchanges — as when millions pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play basketball — and that redistributive taxation is “on a par with forced labour”. Communitarians (Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer) objected that the self behind the veil is an “unencumbered self” stripped of the attachments that constitute real persons. Feminists (Susan Moller Okin) asked whether the family was subject to justice; Marxists that the theory ignored class; others (Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum) that primary goods should be replaced by capabilities; G. A. Cohen that incentives for the talented are a form of hostage-taking.

In conversation

• The veil of ignorance — justice chosen without knowing who you will be.
• The difference principle — inequality only for the sake of the worst-off.
• Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain — liberty upsets every pattern.