Related Ideas

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John Bordley Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921. He earned a BA at Princeton in 1943, served in the Pacific during the Second World War, and returned to Princeton in 1946. He married Margaret Fox in 1949 and received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1950. He and Margaret had four children. He died in 2002.

Rawls taught first at Cornell and later at Harvard University. In 1951 he published an article entitled "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics." This was followed in 1958 by "Justice as Fairness." His most famous book, A Theory of Justice, appeared in 1971. He expanded and modified his views in Political Liberalism, published in 1993. He extended his theory to international relations in The Law of Peoples, published in 1999.

Rawls is generally credited with being the person most responsible for the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy in the 1970s. For decades, Anglo-American moral philosophers had been criticized for focusing on linguistic issues. They typically divided moral philosophy into two main parts: the analytical and the normative. On the whole, they confined their attention to analytical issues such as the meaning of ethical terms or the analysis of ethical concepts. There was much discussion of such concepts as 'good' and 'ought;' but there was little work done on normative issues such as 'What is good?" or "What ought we to do?" Most philosophers were satisfied to say that their analytical work was preparatory in nature and would indirectly help in the resolution of normative issues.

Rawls' Theory of Justice was a major exception to this rule. He attempted not simply to provide an analysis of the concept of justice but to argue for substantive principles that tell us how to live. In a word, he did normative political philosophy. Whether people agreed or disagreed, his work produced a great deal of discussion. It was widely reviewed and many books and articles were written in response. His theory quickly became the theory to defend or criticize. Any political philosopher writing after Rawls had to respond to what Rawls had said. In this sense, he was the most influential American political philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. In considering Rawls' work, Michael Sandel has suggested that it gave rise to three debates among political philosophers: (1) a debate over whether justice should be founded on utilitarian theory or on a theory of individual rights, (2) a debate among rights-oriented liberals over which rights people have, and (3) a debate over whether government should be neutral among different conceptions of the good life.

In addition, his work had an appeal that extended beyond the circle of professional philosophers. His ideas of an "original position" and a "veil of ignorance" became widely known and were sometimes used by non-philosophers to prove their points.

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