John Rawls
John Rawls was a prominent political philosopher known for his theory of justice as fairness. He argued that a just society is one that individuals would agree to under fair, impartial conditions. Rawls' influential work, "A Theory of Justice," has had a significant impact on political and ethical thought, particularly in discussions of distributive justice and the role of government in addressing social inequalities.
7 Key excerpts on "John Rawls"
eBook - ePub- Ian Adams, R.W. Dyson(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...John Rawls (1921–2002) John Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He went to Princeton in 1939, taking his degree in 1943. After military service during World War II, he taught at Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, finally, at Harvard, where he was a Professor of Philosophy for almost forty years. He became John Cowles University Professor at Harvard in 1976. He published numerous articles and reviews. His articles tended to be preliminary exercises leading to two large and influential books: A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). He died on 27 November 2002. A Theory of Justice is Rawls’s major contribution to political theory. The notion of justice that he develops in it is often referred to as ‘justice as fairness’ (‘Justice as Fairness’ was the title given to a preliminary article published in the Philosophical Review in 1958 and reprinted in several anthologies since). In a certain sense, Rawls’s argument is a rehabilitation of the old explanatory device of the social contract. Unlike the social contractarians of the seventeenth century, however, Rawls does not make the device part of a theory of obligation. Rather, he employs it in an attempt to establish what he thinks are rationally necessary principles of social justice. His chief purpose in doing so is to avoid what he regards as the major drawback of utilitarian or consequentialist thinking: namely, that such thinking can sanction the sacrifice or neglect of individual interests for the sake of a ‘greater good’. This, he believes, is contrary to our intuitive beliefs about right and wrong. The system of social justice that he envisages will, as a matter of principle, exclude no one from its benefits. Rawls’s underlying conviction is that a just or fair political order is one that provides similar opportunities for everyone to live a happy and fulfilled life. Rawls’s procedure is to invite us to engage in a thought-experiment...
...CHAPTER 4 The Liberal Theory of Justice: John Rawls All social primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favored. (A Theory of Justice, 1971 [henceforth TJ ], p. 303) John Rawls’s Theory of Justice as Fairness In John Rawls’s theory of Justice as Fairness, we have what is probably the most important contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century, one with which both friends and foes must come to terms. Stuart Hampshire called it “the most substantial and interesting contribution to moral philosophy since the [Second World] War [wherein] the substance of a critical and liberal political philosophy is argued with an assurance and breadth of mind that puts the book in the tradition of Adam Smith and Mill and Sidgwick.” 1 Robert Nisbett calls it the “long awaited successor to Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Rock on which the Church of Equality can properly be founded in our time.” In scope and power, it rivals the classics of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Deservedly, no philosophical work in the last quarter of a century has been quoted or debated more than this one. Fundamentally egalitarian (see quotation above), it seeks to justify the welfare state. Rawls accepts that liberal ideas of justice can only be justified where the “circumstances of justice” obtain, that is, in a situation of relative affluence like those in Western nations. In his second book, Political Liberalism (Harvard, 1994), he clarifies his position as attempting to provide political stability. He recognizes our society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage” (TJ, 4). A modern society is pluralistic, made up of vastly different worldviews with competing conceptions of the good...
eBook - ePub- Nigel Warburton(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...32 John Rawls a Theory of Justice DOI: 10.4324/9781315849201-32 What kind of a society would you choose to live in if you didn’t know the position you would occupy within it? John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice provides the principles for constructing a fair and just society by imagining a reasonable person’s response to this question. The book, first published in 1971, transformed political philosophy. It rejuvenated the social contract tradition established by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Though a complex and in places rather dry book, it is one of the most widely read works of political philosophy of the twentieth century. Its most distinctive aspect is its use of the notion of the ‘original position’ to arrive at conclusions about fairness and justice and how we should achieve them in our social institutions. The Original Position If you were to choose the principles which should govern the best possible society you might be biased in various ways towards your own class, profession, sexual orientation, and so on. Rawls’ way around this is to set up a thought experiment, a hypothetical situation in which all the facts about your self, and your particular desires, are hidden from you behind a veil of ignorance. You have to imagine not knowing whether or not you have a job, what sex you are, whether you have a family, where you live, how intelligent you are, whether you are an optimist, a pessimist, a drug addict. Yet at the same time you have a good grasp of politics and economics, the basis of social organisation and the laws of human psychology. You know that there are basic goods required for almost any lifestyle, and these include certain freedoms, opportunity, income and self-respect...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Pursuing that thought would be the work of a lifetime. Over the course of the turbulent 1960s, Rawls assembled, essay by essay, the component parts of the grand presentation of his theory of justice in his classic work, A Theory of Justice (1971). Although Rawls had been a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, his first major book was at some remove from the political and historical particulars of its time and place, making for much controversy over just how radical Rawls really was, and how and where his theory could be applied. Condemned both as hopelessly utopian and as a mouthpiece for “end of ideology” liberal gradualism, Rawls quickly found his views being assailed from all sides (Daniels [1975] 1989). The bottom line of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness as presented in Theory can seem straightforward: A just liberal society will have its basic legal, economic, and social institutions—the “basic structure of society”—arranged to accord with the following two principles of justice: First, “[e]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all”; second, “[s]ocial and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) Attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (Rawls [1971] 1999, 302). These principles are lexically ordered, in that the first principle, of liberty, takes priority over the second; liberty “can be restricted only for the sake of liberty.” Moreover, the “second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle”—that is, (b) takes priority over (a) in the second principle (Rawls [1971] 1999, 302–03)...
eBook - ePubThe Right to Democracy in International Law
Between Procedure, Substance and the Philosophy of John Rawls
- Khalifa A Alfadhel(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This part will focus on the first principle with some reference to the other two with regard to citizenship and democracy. The most important aspect of A Theory of Justice was the veil of ignorance doctrine. Rawls presented it as an essential element of liberal democracy and rational political participation. This doctrine is of significant importance to this book, and will be examined thoroughly throughout this chapter. To begin assessing A Theory of Justice, one must first examine the ‘original position’. Rawls revived the social contract theory, or at least revisited it, when political conditions evolved way beyond what they were centuries ago. The founders of the social contract based their theory on the state of nature, which was a hypothetical inconvenient state of lawlessness that preceded formal government, which was controlled by the desires and appetites of individual. Rawls on the other hand described the state that preceded government as ‘the original position’. To Rawls ‘the original position is the appropriate initial status quo which insures that the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair. This fact yields the name “justice as fairness”.’ 4 In order to achieve justice as provided in the Rawlsian conception of the original position, the ‘principles of justice’ as described earlier need to be taken into account. The most important one that is central to this assessment is the principle of liberty. Rawls provided: ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others’. 5 Rawls stressed that this principle stands superior to the others, where no economic and social advantages are to be gained at the expense of liberty. 6 In other words, ‘liberty may only be limited for the sake of liberty’. 7 Of course, like most American philosophical doctrines, it gives property (i.e. the liberty to acquire property) a great deal...
eBook - ePub- Dominic Welburn(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This is not to say that justice will be intrinsic to all doctrines, and indeed for some liberal justice will be at best instrumental to their own comprehensive ends. Crucially, however, Rawls claims that the consensus will be internally stable ‘for the right reasons’ because, as previously stated, a modus vivendi is liable to change as groups or individuals rise to prominence in societies characterized by a balance of power (PL : 388). Rawls believed that justice as fairness, articulated within such a consensus, has the advantage over other theories in that it steers citizens away from any such controversial contest in the first place. Instead, Rawls’s justice as fairness insists on remaining impartial between such competing conceptions of the good, allowing citizens to cooperate politically as free and equal persons. From this angle, citizens must ‘bracket’ or marginalize what they believe to be the truth when dealing with constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice just as their representatives would in the hypothetical OP. Justice as fairness no longer triumphs over other theories of justice and is not incompatible with other conceptions of justice found in a multitude of other moral doctrines. It can be said to be freestanding insomuch as it is intended to constitute a sphere beyond the ‘narrowness’ of comprehensive doctrines, and one which amounts to a form of positioned – or specific – impartiality rather than neutrality. There are, therefore, three distinguishing features of Rawls’s political conception of justice that, as will become clear in the next chapter, are relevant to green concerns. First, his political liberalism refers to the ‘basic structure of society’; that is, it concentrates not only on ‘constitutional essentials’, but also on the main political, social, and economic institutions that allow for the existence of a coherent system of cooperation that endures from one generation to the next (PL : 11)...
eBook - ePubGlobal Justice
Critical Perspectives
- Sebastiano Maffettone, Aakash Singh Rathore, Sebastiano Maffettone, Aakash Singh Rathore(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...LoP hopes to say how a world Society of liberal and decent Peoples might be possible’ (Rawls 1999a: 6). Rawls also emphasizes that the conception of justice employed in LoP is the political conception first presented in PL (Rawls 1996) rather than the thicker one employed in TJ. This continuity raises a problem of its own. For the theoretical model that Rawls employs — both in TJ and in PL — was first developed in his treatment of domestic politics in a pluralistic society, before being transferred to issues that extended beyond the national context. From a socio-economic perspective, the main issue raised by extending the national model to the international context concerns the possibility of defending a normative requirement of relative socio-economic equality between peoples. In LoP, Rawls removes the three pillars of the egalitarianism of TJ : the fair value of the basic liberties, the fair equality of opportunity and the difference principle (Pogge 1994). Clearly, he does this because there is no global basic structure comparable to the national one. It is not surprising that many critics, including many sympathetic to Rawls’s theory at the national level, have been perplexed by this lack of egalitarian liberalism at the international level. Of course, it must be said that the issues treated in LoP are intrinsically controversial and that they present difficulties for any view of international relations. Even political realism, the dominant theory of international relations in the 20th century from Morgenthau to Kissinger, faced its fair share of problems in recent decades, particularly from the 1970s onwards. In particular, it had to adapt to a new world in which two of its basic theoretical pillars had been much weakened, namely, national sovereignty and the traditional identification between people and state...
