Who is john rawls

The Law of Peoples. Extends political liberalism to cover the relations of liberal democratic regimes to other societies. Very controversial in rejecting the direct extension of principles of domestic justice to the global order. A Theory of Justice. However, it appeared in English only in , well after other developments in his theory had occurred. The new preface, written in , includes important clarifications. Lengthy and complicated, but rewards careful, repeated study. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

Edited by Erin Kelly. Political Liberalism. Expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press, Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. But once you are playing baseball, it is clear whether or not a triple has been hit. Even close cases, such as a photo-finish race to beat a throw from an outfielder, just confirm that we know what a triple is. The legal philosopher H. Hart argued that law, too, is a game in this way. But once you are involved in legal argument, you tacitly accept that certain things count as law.

If you start to insist that Leviticus trumps the San Francisco municipal code, then you have become the person waving a baseball bat on the soccer pitch, hoping to get to third base in a game where third base does not exist. Social morality, which is the topic of justice, had its own tacit rules, and drawing those out could help to make clear what people already knew when not distracted by self-interest or prejudice.

Like the rule book for a well-established sport, the original position and the principles that Rawls drew from it did not dictate some new morality. They helped to spell out the terms of a social practice. Although Rawls was not an anti-New Deal reactionary, he shared the worries of some liberals and centrists that the expanded American state would end up interfering with personal autonomy through perennial supervision of the economy. He preferred to think that if the state established the right set of operating principles and guardrails, people would be able to get along on their own, with no more than modest political intrusion or contest.

It became conventional to say that Americans had mostly agreed on the essential principles of liberty, equality, and democracy—and, less abstractly, private property, regulated markets, and courts of law. Conflict was the exception. Radical dissenters were outliers. A Theory of Justice was both radical and conservative.

At the same time, it described the principles of reconstruction as ones that Americans already held. This strategy of squaring the circle might seem odd: How can a country be committed to principles it routinely and pervasively defies and ignores?

Constitutional redemption was the defining ideal of Cold War liberal patriotism. Its strategies became, by subtle philosophical transformation, the strategy of A Theory of Justice : to say that Americans already are what they have never yet been—and that this ideal is also incipiently universal, if other peoples can make their way to it.

Forrester is a subtle intellectual historian as well as a political theorist, and she does not imply that one book, even a work as field-defining as A Theory of Justice , can in fact define a field. These thinkers continued a search for the impersonal perspective on politics that Rawls had put at the heart of the field.

Ironically, however, the consensus Rawls had counted on was already gone by the polarized late s, which saw violent backlash against the civil rights movement, vicious clashes over the Vietnam War, and acts of domestic terrorism from both the militant left and the racist right. There was little more reason in to think that Americans shared an abiding consensus than there is in Rawls offers them various principles to consider.

Among them are his own principles to be described below and the two versions of utilitarianism, classical and average. Would rational parties behind a veil of ignorance choose average utilitarianism? The economist John Harsanyi argues that they would because it would be rational for parties lacking any other information to maximize their expectation of well-being. Harsanyi Since they do not know who they will be, they will therefore want to maximize the average level of well-being in society.

The most crucial difference concerns the motivation that is attributed to the parties by stipulation. The veil deprives the parties of any knowledge of the values—the conception of the good—of the person into whose shoes they are to imagine stepping. What, then, are they to prefer? Since Harsanyi refuses to supply his parties with any definite motivation, his answer is somewhat mysterious. Rawls instead defines the parties as having a determinate set of motivations. The parties in the hypothetical OP are to choose on behalf of persons in society, for whom they are, in effect, trustees.

PL at 76, The veil of ignorance, however, prevents the parties from knowing anything particular about the preferences, likes or dislikes, commitments or aversions of those persons.

They also know nothing particular about the society for which they are choosing. On what basis, then, can the parties choose? To ascribe to them a full theory of the human good would fly in the face of the facts of pluralism, for such theories are deeply controversial.

This is the only motivation that TJ ascribes to the parties. The parties are motivated neither by benevolence nor by envy or spite. The former tradition attempts to imagine the point of view of a fully benevolent spectator of the human scene who reacts impartially and sympathetically to all human travails and successes.

The ideal-observer theory typically imagines a somewhat more dispassionate or impersonal, but still omniscient, observer of the human scene. Each of these approaches asks us to imagine what such a spectator or observer would morally approve.

Rawls was determined to get beyond this impasse. He suggests that the OP should combine the mutual-disinterest assumption with the veil of ignorance. This combination, he argues, will achieve the rough moral equivalence of universal benevolence without either neglecting the separateness of persons or sacrificing definiteness of results.

As we will see, the definite positive motivations that Rawls ascribes to the parties are crucial to explaining why they will prefer his principles to average utilitarianism. The primary goods are supposed to be uncontroversially worth seeking, albeit not for their own sakes.

Although this claim seems quite modest, philosophers rebutted it by describing life plans or worldviews for which one or another of the primary goods is not useful. These counterexamples revealed the need for a different rationale for the primary goods.

At roughly the same time, Rawls began to develop further the Kantian strand in his view. These Kantian ideas ended up providing a new rationale for the primary goods. See CP essays 13, 16, Kant held that the true principles of morality are not imposed on us by our psyches or by eternal conceptual relations that hold true independently of us; rather, Kant argued, the moral law is a law that our reason gives to itself. It is, in this sense, self-chosen or autonomous law. Smith or Mr. Jones chooses to believe it does.

Once it is so set up the parties are to choose principles. Their task of choosing principles thus models the idea of autonomy. The parties to the OP, in selecting principles, implement this idea of autonomy.

How they represent equality and rationality are obvious, for they are equally situated and are rational by definition. Reasonableness enters the OP not principally by the rationality of the parties but by the constraints on them—most especially the veil of ignorance. To conceive of persons as reasonable and rational, then, is to conceive of them as having certain higher-order powers.

Second, we can also revise our ends when we see reason to do so. The parties are conceived as having highest-order interests that correspond directly to these highest-order powers. Although the account of the moral powers was present in TJ , it is only in his later works that Rawls uses this idea to defend and elaborate the motivation of the parties in the OP. In various, complicated ways, in his later work, Rawls defends the primary goods as being required for free and equal citizens to promote and protect their three moral powers.

This is to cast the primary goods as items objectively needed by moral persons occupying the role of free and equal citizens. In addition, they are concerned with securing for the person they represent the higher-order interests we have in developing and exercising our … moral powers and in securing the conditions under which we can further our determinate conceptions of the good, whatever it is.

His aim remains, nonetheless, to assemble in the OP a series of relatively uncontroversial, relatively fixed points among our considered moral judgments and to build an argument on that basis for the superiority of some principles of justice over others.

The second principle addresses instead those aspects of the basic structure that shape the distribution of opportunities, offices, income, wealth, and in general social advantages. Each of these three centrally addresses a different set of primary goods: the First Principle concerns rights and liberties; the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity concerns opportunities; and the Difference Principle primarily concerns income and wealth.

That the view adequately secures the social basis of self-respect is something that Rawls argues more holistically. The argument that the parties in the OP will prefer Justice as Fairness to utilitarianism and to the various other alternative principles with which they are presented divides into two parts.

There is, first, the question whether the parties will insist upon securing a scheme of equal basic liberties and upon giving them top priority.

Regarding the first part of the argument from the OP, the crucial point is that the parties are stipulated to care about rights and liberties. In addition, he argues that securing the First Principle importantly serves the higher-order interest in an effective sense of justice—and does so better than the pure utilitarian alternative—by better promoting social stability, mutual respect, and social unity. The second part of the argument from the OP takes the First Principle for granted and addresses the matter of social inequalities.

Its sticking point has always been the Difference Principle, which strikingly and influentially articulates a liberal-egalitarian socioeconomic position. It is the Difference Principle that would most clearly demand deep reforms in existing societies. The set-up of the OP suggests the following, informal argument for the difference principle: because equality is an ideal fundamentally relevant to the idea of fair cooperation, the OP situates the parties symmetrically and deprives them of information that could distinguish them or allow one to gain bargaining advantage over another.

Given this set-up, the parties will consider the situation of equal distribution a reasonable starting point in their deliberations. Since they know all the general facts about human societies, however, the parties will realize that society might depart from this starting point by instituting a system of social rules that differentially reward the especially productive and could achieve results that are better for everyone than are the results under rules guaranteeing full equality.

This is the kind of inequality that the Difference Principle allows and requires: departures from full equality that make some better off and no one worse off. Three main refinements are worth noting. First, because the principle pertains to the basic structure of society and because the parties are comparing different societies organized around different principles, the expectations that matter are not those of particular people but those of representative members of broad social classes.

Second, to make his exposition a little simpler, Rawls makes some technical assumptions that let him focus only on the expectations of the least-well-off representative class in a given society.

Allowed by these simplifying assumptions to focus only on the least well off representative persons, the Difference Principle thus holds that social rules allowing for inequalities in income and wealth are acceptable just in case those who are least well off under those rules are better off than the least-well-off representative persons under any alternative sets of social rules.

This formulation already takes account of the third refinement, which recognizes that the people who are the worst off under one set of social arrangements may not be the same people as those who are worst off under some other set of social arrangements.

PL at 7n. The Difference Principle requires society to look out for the least well off. But would the parties to the OP prefer the Difference Principle to a utilitarian principle of distribution?

With nothing but the bare idea of rationality to guide them, they will naturally choose any principle that will maximize their utility expectation. Since this is what the principle of Average Utilitarianism does, they will choose it. Rawls never defends the primary goods as goods in themselves. Rather, he defends them as versatile means. In the later theory, the primary goods are defended as facilitating the pursuit and revision, by the persons the parties represent, of their conceptions of the good.

While the parties do not know what those conceptions of the good are, they do care about whether the persons they represent can pursue and revise them. With this departure from Harsanyi in mind, we may finally explain why the parties in the OP will prefer the principles of Justice as Fairness, including the Difference Principle, to average utilitarianism. The maximin rule is a general rule for making choices under conditions of uncertainty.

The maximin rule directs one to select that alternative where the minimum place is higher on whatever the relevant measure is than the minimum place in any other alternative. They care about the primary goods and the highest-order moral powers, but they also know, in effect, that the primary goods that they are motivated to seek are not what the persons they represent ultimately care about.

Accordingly, it is rational for them to take a cautious approach. They must do what they can to assure to the persons they represent have a sufficient supply of primary goods for those persons to be able to pursue whatever it is that they do take to be good.

The crucial social good is self respect, and Rawls argued that justice as fairness furthers the equal distribution of the conditions necessary for this good.

In Rawls published Political Liberalism, based in part on lectures and work published since but much more than a collection of essays. The book refines and corrects some shortcomings of A Theory of Justice, but beyond that it gives a new focus to the central concerns of the earlier work. Political Liberalism does not depart from the principles put forth in the earlier work, but recasts them in a specifically political context.

The question Rawls seeks to answer in this book is not the general one of how social justice can be established, but rather how a free, just and stable political order can be maintained in the present historical and social situation marked by pluralism of religious, philosophical and moral doctrines. Not only is Rawls' work a seminal one in its own right, but A Theory of Justice also sparked a revival in political philosophy.

Political Liberalism in turn generated additional discussion and debate. Given this, the contribution of his thought is difficult to assess. There is little doubt, however, that A Theory of Justice is one of the most important works in philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century. It is also a work that reached beyond the confines of the academy to help influence the reality about which it speaks: the world of our political order.

For helpful works on Rawls, see N.