John Rawls

Quick Facts

• Full name: John Bordley Rawls
• Lived: 1921-2002
• From: Baltimore, Maryland, United States
• Main field: political philosophy
• Main tradition: liberal egalitarianism
• Major posts: Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and Harvard
• Best known for: justice as fairness, the original position, the veil of ignorance, the difference principle, and public reason

The Big Question

What basic rules would free and equal citizens choose for their society if they had to choose fairly, without knowing whether they would be born rich or poor, powerful or powerless, healthy or disabled, favored or excluded?

Rawls asks this because real societies are full of luck. Nobody earns their birth family, class, race, sex, natural talents, or early school system. Yet those facts shape income, education, health, safety, and political power. Rawls wants principles of justice that do not simply reward people for being born in the right place.

In One Minute

John Rawls rebuilt modern liberal political philosophy around one test: design society from a fair starting point. Imagine choosing the rules while a veil of ignorance hides your own social position. You do not know whether you will be wealthy, poor, religious, atheist, talented, disabled, part of a majority, or part of a vulnerable minority.

Rawls argues that people in that position would choose two main principles. First, everyone gets equal basic liberties. Second, social and economic inequalities are allowed only if offices are genuinely open to all and the inequalities improve the position of the least advantaged. Later, Rawls asked how citizens who disagree about religion and morality can still justify political power to one another in a shared democracy.

What They Taught

Rawls taught that justice is first about the basic structure of society. The basic structure means the main institutions that set up people's life chances: the constitution, courts, property rules, markets, schools, family law, tax system, and welfare state. These institutions decide who gets what kinds of opportunity before anyone has made many choices of their own.

His answer is justice as fairness. "Fairness" does not mean everyone gets the same job, income, or life. It means the rules of cooperation should be acceptable to people regarded as free and equal.

Rawls explains this with the original position. This is a thought experiment, not an actual historical meeting. In it, people choose principles for society from behind a veil of ignorance. They know general facts about human life, conflict, and scarcity. But they do not know their own class, race, sex, religion, talents, health, wealth, family, or personal view of the good life.

The veil blocks special pleading. If you do not know where you will land, you have a reason to protect people in every position. You would not design a society where one religion can silence all others, or where poor children have no real chance, because you might be in those groups.

Rawls says the parties would choose two principles of justice. The first protects equal basic liberties: freedom of conscience, speech, association, political participation, personal liberty, due process, and the rule of law. These liberties have priority. A society cannot take away the vote from one group because it would make the economy grow faster.

The second principle covers opportunity and inequality. Fair equality of opportunity means more than "anyone may apply." People with similar ability and effort should have similar real chances, even if one was born in a rich neighborhood and another in a poor one. This points toward public education, anti-discrimination rules, health care access, and limits on inherited privilege.

The difference principle says inequalities are allowed only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society. Rawls is not arguing for identical incomes. Some inequalities may give people useful incentives. But inequality has to justify itself from the bottom up. It is not enough that the total economy gets larger.

Rawls argues against Utilitarianism because utilitarianism can treat society as if it were one giant person with one happiness score. If sacrificing a minority raises total happiness enough, a utilitarian calculation can seem to permit it. Rawls says this forgets the separateness of persons. Each person has a life of their own.

Rawls also gives a method called reflective equilibrium. Start with judgments you trust, such as "slavery is wrong" or "citizens should have equal political rights." Compare them with broader principles. If they clash, revise either side until the principles and judgments fit better.

In his later work, Rawls turned to political liberalism. Modern democracies contain reasonable pluralism: citizens disagree deeply about religion, morality, family, sexuality, death, and the purpose of life. Rawls asks how people with different worldviews can still share fair political terms.

An overlapping consensus happens when different groups support the same political principles for their own reasons. A Christian, a Muslim, a secular humanist, and a Kantian may disagree about ultimate truth, yet all may support equal rights, fair elections, and religious liberty.

Public reason is the discipline of justifying basic laws in terms other free and equal citizens can reasonably assess. It matters most for constitutional essentials and basic justice: voting rights, free speech, religious liberty, equality before law, and the broad shape of the economy. Rawls is not banning religious or moral speech. He is saying that coercive law needs public justification, not only reasons from one disputed worldview.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Justice as fairness: society should be organized by rules that people could accept from a fair starting point. A tax system should not be designed only from the viewpoint of people who already own most of the property.
• Basic structure: the main institutions that shape life chances. School funding rules matter for justice because they strongly affect what children can become.
• Original position: a fair imaginary choice situation for testing principles of justice. Before choosing health care rules, imagine you do not know whether you will be born healthy, chronically ill, rich, poor, insured, or uninsured.
• Veil of ignorance: the rule that hides your personal place in society while you choose basic principles. If you might be a religious minority, you will likely choose strong freedom of conscience.
• Equal basic liberties: core freedoms that cannot be traded away for money, efficiency, or majority comfort. A government cannot cancel a group's voting rights because doing so would make policy easier.
• Fair equality of opportunity: real opportunity, not just formal permission. "Everyone can apply to college" is not enough if some children have unsafe schools, no books, and untreated health problems.
• Difference principle: inequality is acceptable only if it improves the prospects of the least advantaged. Higher pay for doctors may be justified if it helps poor patients get better care.
• Primary goods: all-purpose things citizens need for many different life plans, such as rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, and self-respect.
• Public reason: political justification that other citizens can reasonably evaluate. An official may personally support a law for religious reasons, but basic law also needs reasons based on shared political values like liberty, equality, safety, and fair cooperation.

Major Works

• A Theory of Justice (1971): Rawls's central book. It presents justice as fairness, the original position, the veil of ignorance, the two principles, and the difference principle. The book tries to replace utilitarianism as the default theory of public morality.
• Political Liberalism (1993): Rawls's answer to a problem in his earlier view. A democratic society cannot depend on everyone sharing one moral or religious doctrine. This book explains reasonable pluralism, overlapping consensus, public reason, and legitimacy.
• The Law of Peoples (1999): Rawls's extension of his thinking to international relations. It asks what principles should guide liberal and "decent" peoples in war, human rights, toleration, and foreign policy. Its modest global claims became a major target of criticism.
• Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001): Rawls's late, shorter presentation of the mature view. It clarifies the basic structure, the two principles, political liberalism, property-owning democracy, and his rejection of laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism.

Why It Matters

Rawls made large-scale political philosophy serious again in English-speaking philosophy. After A Theory of Justice, arguments about liberty, equality, welfare states, markets, rights, democracy, and legitimacy had to answer him.

His thought experiment remains useful because it changes the question. Instead of asking, "What rules help me from where I already stand?", Rawls asks, "What rules could I accept if I might stand anywhere?" That shift matters for health care, school funding, disability policy, racial inequality, religious liberty, and taxation.

Rawls also gave liberalism a more egalitarian shape. Liberty matters first, but liberty is not enough if the social system leaves some people without real chances.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Rawls belongs to Liberalism, especially liberal egalitarianism. He gives the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant a modern form: not a story about how government began, but a test for whether institutions can be justified to equal citizens. He also keeps John Stuart Mill in view, but rejects the utilitarian basis for liberal rights.

Robert Nozick gives the famous libertarian reply. Nozick argues that people have strong rights over themselves and their holdings, so patterned redistribution violates liberty. Rawls asks whether those holdings arise inside a fair system in the first place.

Communitarian critics such as Alasdair MacIntyre argue that Rawls pictures people too abstractly, apart from traditions, loyalties, and inherited moral communities. Rawls's reply is that the original position is a fairness test for political principles, not a full picture of the human person.

G. A. Cohen criticizes Rawls from the left, arguing that the difference principle can be too friendly to inequality. Charles Mills says Rawlsian ideal theory does not face racial domination directly enough. Amartya Sen argues that justice should focus less on perfect design and more on reducing real injustices.

Rawls's descendants and close interlocutors include Ronald Dworkin, T. M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, and Elizabeth Anderson. Even when they disagree with him, they inherit his question: what would equal respect require from our shared institutions?

Related Pages

• Political Liberalism
• Liberalism
• Immanuel Kant
• John Locke
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Utilitarianism
• Robert Nozick
• Ronald Dworkin
• John Stuart Mill