Rawls on the RPF

Bio

John Borden (Bordley) Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was
the second of five sons to William Lee Rawls and Anna Abell Stump.
Rawls only attended school in Baltimore for a short time before
transferring to a renowned Episcopalian preparatory school in
Connecticut called Kent. Upon graduation in 1939, Rawls went on to
Princeton University where he became interested in philosophy.

In 1943, he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree and joined the army.
During this time (World War II), Rawls served as an infantryman in the
Pacific where he toured New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan and
witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. After this
experience, Rawls turned down the offer of becoming an officer and left
the army as a private in 1946. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Princeton
to write a doctorate in moral philosophy.

Rawls married Margaret Fox, a Brown graduate, in 1949. He and Margaret
had a shared interest in indexing—they spent their first holiday together
writing the index for a book on Nietzsche. After earning his Ph.D. from
Princeton in 1950, Rawls taught there until 1952, when he received a
Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ Church), where he was
influenced by Isaiah Berlin.

He then returned to the United States, serving first as an assistant and
then associate professor at Cornell University (1953-1959), and then as
professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960-
1962). Then in 1962, Rawls moved across town to Harvard University,
where he remained for almost forty years.

In 1971, Rawls set forth his landmark A Theory of Justice, which
describes his principles for “justice as fairness.” (In keeping with his
earlier passion, he wrote the index for the book himself.) In this work,
Rawls argues strongly for equality and individual rights, though in a very
particular sense (see below). These ideas would be strongly countered
three years later by fellow Harvard professor Robert Nozick, in his
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).

Not content to rest with his theory, in 1993 Rawls published Political
Liberalism, which revised his earlier ideas somewhat. Structured from
some of his lectures in the 1980s, Political Liberalism focuses on the
question of stability: could a society ordered according to the main tenets
laid out in A Theory of Justice endure? Modifying his conception of a “well-
ordered society,” Rawls recognizes that modern society is teaming with
contrasting, often contradictory, opinions, and he introduces the idea of an
overlapping consensus—or agreement on justice as fairness between
citizens who hold different religious and philosophical views (or
conceptions of the good). Political Liberalism also introduced the idea of
public reason—the common reason of all citizens (compare with
Rousseau's idea of the "general will").

Unfortunately, Rawls suffered the first of several strokes in 1995, which
severely impeded his ability to continue working. Nonetheless, he was
still able to complete a work entitled, The Law of Peoples, which contains
the most complete statement of his views on international justice.

Rawls died on November 24, 2002, at 81 years of age. The obituary that
appeared in the Harvard Gazette says: “Rawls is considered by many to
be the most important political philosopher of the second half of the 20th
century and a powerful advocate of the liberal perspective.”

Political and Moral Philosophy
Rawls is noted for his contributions to liberal political philosophy. Among
the ideas from Rawls' work that have received especially wide attention
are:

* The original position and the veil of ignorance.
* Reflective equilibrium.
* The two principles of justice
* Justice as fairness.

Method: The Original Position and the veil of ignorance
In his most famous book, A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued for his
principles by asking us to imagine an “original position,” from which
representatives would select principles of justice from behind a “veil of
ignorance.” The original position is to be understood as a development of
the social contract theories of Locke, Kant, and Rousseau. Rawls argued
that the representative parties in the original position would select his
principles of justice to govern the basic structure of society.

In order for the original position to be objective, Rawls invented the veil of
ignorance. The primary purpose is to take away any incentive we might
have to argue for situations which are to our own advantage, rather than
strictly just. In short, the veil of ignorance demands that none of the
imaginary parties in the original position, the engineers of the social
contract, may know anything about what kind of life they will lead, or what
kind of personal beliefs they may hold. They will not even know when in
the world they will be born: “They must choose principles the
consequences of which they are prepared to live with whatever generation
they turn out to belong to” (sec. 24). It is thus supposed that the principles
to emerge from behind the veil of ignorance can be characterized as fair.

Clearly we cannot in reality shield individuals from the knowledge of the
particular set of circumstances that surround their lives. However, Rawls
does not expect the veil of ignorance to be applied to real individuals. He
envisioned it more as a thought experiment, to challenge us to be honest
with ourselves. The initial condition therefore has two functions:

* It functions as an "expository device" that allows us to work out the
principles of justice
* It presents us with a "standpoint" from which the principles of justice
should be examined

Nonetheless, there are certain logical difficulties with the veil of
ignorance, since, in effect, it asks us to set aside the very principles and
beliefs (values) that we may well need to evaluate the pros and cons of
our system of justice.

Reflective Equilibrium
In addition to the original position, Rawls relied on the notion of “reflective
equilibrium,” which tests the results obtained from the original position
against our considered judgments about particular cases. Rawls’ goal
here was to double-check our judgments, working “from both ends.” He
says, “It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments
coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our
judgments conform” (sec. 4). This idea follows, of course, the general
scientific theory of hypothesizing and testing, and is generally logically
sound. One should be aware of the potential trap, however, which many
scientists have fallen into as well, of examining data with the hopes that it
will support a given hypothesis.

The Two Principles of Justice:
The Liberty Principle and the Difference Principle
The two principles of justice are the liberty principle and the difference
principle. The two principles are intended to apply to the basic structure of
society—the fundamental political and economic arrangements—as
opposed to particular actions by governmental officials or individual
statutes.

The liberty principle requires that the basic structure provide each citizen
with a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties--such as freedom of
conscience, freedom of expression, and due process of law. The
difference principle requires that inequalities in wealth and social position
be arranged so as to the benefit the worst off group in the world. Rawls
states that the two principles are lexically ordered, with the liberty principle
taking precedence over the difference principle in the case of conflict.

Rawls revised the two principles over time. A Theory of Justice contains
the first and most widely cited version of the principles, but Rawls
modified them in Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness.

Justice as fairness
Rawls begins A Theory of Justice by addressing the fundamental motor
behind his theory: the idea of justice as fairness. This, at first glance,
seems that it should be self evident. Isn’t justice supposed to be, after all,
concerned with fairness? But in the first place, we musn’t forget previous
attempts by philosophers to define justice in quite different terms (i.e.,
Plato’s definition of justice as virtue). And in the second place, Rawls has
a very particular definition of fairness in mind. He states that an individual
is morally required to do what an institution asks him to do (that is, it's fair
that the institution demands that he do it) as long as:

a) the institution itself is just (or fair), in that it satisfies the two principles
of justice; and
b) the person “has voluntarily accepted the benefits of the arrangement”
(sec. 18)

The main idea, Rawls says, is that “We are not to gain from the
cooperative labors of others without doing our fair share” (ibid; for this
idea Rawls acknowledges H. L. A. Hart’s “Are There Any Natural Rights?”
Philosophical Review, v. 64, 1955). Clearly, this is a clause to guard
against freeloaders in a system. But it poses its own philosophical
problems. What if, for example, the “cooperative labors” of others
“improve” (in the Lockean sense) on a shared natural resource, which
you would just as soon leave alone? If you fail to reject some negligible
benefit from the change (such as the piped-in water you may receive now
that they have completely sealed off the spring well), are you still required
to participate in the defilement (i.e., help maintain the water pump and
keep the chinks sealed up)? While Rawls insists on the one hand that
participation must be voluntary, he considers the acceptance of benefit as
at least tacit acceptance of the arrangement.

(Excerpts taken and built upon from the Wikipedia article on Rawls. Also consulted
was his Harvad Gazette obituary.)

Works

Online

"Two Concepts of Rules"

"The Basic Liberties and Their Priority," from the Tanner Lectures series

"Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers' Brief " (joint amicus brief to the
Supreme Court on assisted suicide, with Thomson, Dworkin, Nozick,
Scanlon, and Nagel)

Hardcopy
NOTE: As Rawls' work is not yet in the public domain, there is little available online.
The following sources are links to Amazon.com.

A Theory of Justice

Political Liberalism

Justice as Fairness