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American moral, legal and political philosopher
- John Bordley Rawls (/ rɔːlz /; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.
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John Bordley Rawls (/ r ɔː l z /; [2] February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. [3] [4] Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century. [5]
Oct 9, 2024 · John Rawls, American political and ethical philosopher, best known for his defense of egalitarian liberalism in his major works A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993). He is widely considered the most important political philosopher of the 20th century.
Mar 25, 2008 · John Rawls (b. 1921, d. 2002) was an American political philosopher in the liberal tradition. His theory of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system.
Rawls approves the private property system over the socialist system. He is of the notion that through the private property system, society can achieve justice in economic relationships. If provided with the right institutional framework, it would achieve greater efficiency.
- Biographical Sketch
- Rawls’s Mature Work: A Theory of Justice
- Problems of Extension
- References and Further Reading
John Bordley Rawls was born and schooled in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Although his family was of comfortable means, his youth was twice marked by tragedy. In two successive years, his two younger brothers contracted an infectious disease from him—diphtheria in one case and pneumonia in the other—and died. Rawls’s vivid sense of the arbitrariness of...
a. The Basic Structure of Society
The subject matter of Rawls’s theory is societal practices and institutions. Some social institutions can provoke envy and resentment. Others can foster alienation and exploitation. Is there a way of organizing society that can keep these problems within livable limits? Can society be organized around fair principles of cooperation in a way the people would stably accept? Rawls’s original thought is that equality, or a fair distribution of advantages, is to be addressed as a background matter...
b. Utilitarianism as the Principal Opponent
Rawls explains in the Preface to the first edition of TJ that one of the book’s main aims is to provide a “workable and systematic moral conception to oppose” utilitarianism. TJ at xvii. Utilitarianism comes in various forms. Classical utilitarianism, the nineteenth century theory of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, is the philosophy of “the greatest good of the greatest number.” The more modern version is average utilitarianism, which asks us not to maximize the amount of good or happine...
c. The Original Position
Recognizing that social institutions distort our views (by sometimes generating envy, resentment, alienation, or false consciousness) and bias matters in their own favor (by indoctrinating and habituating those who grow up under them), Rawls saw the need for a justificatory device that would give us critical distance from them. The original position (OP) is his “Archimedean Point,” the fulcrum he uses to obtain critical leverage. TJ at 230-32. The OP is a thought experiment that asks: what pr...
The modesty and restraint we have noted in Rawls’s general approach is also revealed in the way he set aside a number of difficult questions that properly arise within his self-assigned topic. Complicated as his view is, he was keenly aware of the many simplifying assumptions made by his argument. “We need to be tolerant of simplifications.” TJ at ...
A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as TJ].Political Liberalism, rev. ed., Columbia University Press, 1996 [cited as PL].Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman, Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as CP].The Law of Peoples, Harvard University Press, 1999 [cited as LP].John Rawls was an eminent American philosopher, who made remarkable contributions to the fields of moral and political philosophy. Rawls is best known for his highly praised and widely discussed book, ‘A Theory of Justice’, which is globally regarded as the most significant work in political philosophy. His work and theories in political ...
John Rawls (February 21, 1921–November 24, 2002) was a renowned American political philosopher and a significant representative of liberalism within the academy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University, and received the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
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