John Rawls

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Lore & Background

Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the second of five sons. His father, William Lee Rawls, was a prominent Baltimore attorney, and his mother, Anna Abell Stump Rawls, was active in local Democratic politics, including advocacy for women's voting rights. Two of his brothers died in childhood because they had contracted fatal illnesses from him. In 1928, the seven-year-old Rawls contracted diphtheria; his brother Bobby visited him and was fatally infected. The next winter, Rawls contracted pneumonia, and another younger brother, Tommy, caught the illness and died. Rawls's biographer Thomas Pogge called these losses the "most important events in John's childhood." He graduated from Princeton University in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, writing an intensely religious senior thesis titled "Meaning of Sin and Faith." Rawls enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1943, serving as an infantryman in the Pacific with the 128th Infantry Regiment of the 32nd Infantry Division. He served in New Guinea and the Philippines, where he endured intensive trench warfare and lost his Christian faith. After the surrender of Japan, he was promoted to sergeant but became disillusioned after seeing the aftermath of the atomic blast in Hiroshima. He later refused an order to discipline a fellow soldier, "believing no punishment was justified," and was "demoted back to a private." He left military service in January 1946. Rawls returned to Princeton for a doctorate in moral philosophy, completing his PhD in 1950 after a dissertation titled "A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character." He taught at Princeton until 1952, then received a Fulbright Fellowship to Christ Church at Oxford, where he was influenced by Isaiah Berlin and H. L. A. Hart. In fall 1953, he became an assistant professor at Cornell University, receiving tenure three years later. After a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1959–60, he was appointed a professor at MIT in 1960. In 1962, he moved to Harvard, where he taught for almost forty years until mandatory retirement in 1991. He trained many leading figures, including Thomas Nagel, Allan Gibbard, Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and T. M. Scanlon. Rawls was, for a time, a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, put forward by Milton Friedman in 1968, but withdrew three years later. He rarely gave interviews and, having both a stutter (which he attributed to his brothers' deaths) and a "bat-like horror of the limelight," did not become a public intellectual. He died from heart failure at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2002, at age 81, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Reader's Guide

Rawls's significance lies in his revival of normative political philosophy with the 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice. His theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. He used the "original position" thought experiment, in which people deliberatively select principles of justice behind a "veil of ignorance," lacking knowledge of their gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, religion, and disability status. In Political Liberalism (1993), he addressed how political power can be exercised legitimately in a society where citizens hold diverse and often conflicting moral, religious, and philosophical points of view. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999. The latter was presented by President Bill Clinton in recognition of how his works "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one." His works are frequently cited by courts in the United States and Canada and referred to by practicing politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom. In a 2008 national survey of political theorists based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited U.S. colleges and universities, Rawls was voted first on the list of "Scholars Who Have Had the Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years."

Did You Know?

• Rawls's senior thesis at Princeton, titled 'Meaning of Sin and Faith,' was 181 pages long and attacked Pelagianism because it 'would render the Cross of Christ to no effect.'
• Two of Rawls's brothers died in childhood from illnesses they contracted from him—diphtheria in 1928 and pneumonia the following winter.
• Rawls served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, was awarded a Combat Infantryman Badge and Bronze Star, and was later demoted from sergeant to private after refusing to discipline a fellow soldier.
• Rawls was put forward for membership in the Mont Pèlerin Society by Milton Friedman in 1968 and withdrew three years later, just before A Theory of Justice was published.
• In a 2008 survey of 1,086 U.S. political theorists, Rawls was voted first among scholars with the greatest impact on political theory in the past 20 years.