John Rawls: biography, personal life, works

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:41

John Rawls was one of the leading American philosophers who specialized in moral and political philosophy. He was the author of The Theory of Justice, which is still considered one of the most important publications in political philosophy. He was awarded the Shock Prize in Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal. In addition to his career in philosophy, Rawls also served in the US Army during World War II, in the Pacific, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. After leaving the army, he continued his education and received his doctorate from Princeton University. He later taught at Harvard University.

Childhood and youth

John Rawls was born in B altimore, Maryland. His parents: William Lee - lawyer, Anna Abell Stump. He suffered an early emotional upheaval when two of his brothers died in childhood due to illness.

He attended school in B altimore, after which he entered the Kent School in Connecticut. Entered Princeton University in 1939.

BIn 1943, shortly after receiving his degree in art, he joined the United States Army. He served in World War II but left the military after witnessing the bombing of Hiroshima.

After refusing to serve in the army, he re-entered Princeton University in 1946 to earn a doctorate in moral philosophy. At Princeton, he came under the influence of Wittgenstein's student Norman Malcolm.

In 1950, John Rawls published a dissertation titled "Inquiry into Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Reference to Judgments of the Moral Value of Character."

After receiving his doctorate in 1950, he began teaching at Princeton University, remaining in that position for two years.

Change of views

As a college student, Rawls wrote an extremely religious dissertation and considered studying to become a priest. Yet Rawls lost his Christian faith in World War II after seeing death in battle and learning about the horrors of the Holocaust. Then, in the 1960s, Rawls spoke out against America's military actions in Vietnam. The Vietnam conflict prompted Rawls to examine the flaws in the American political system that had led him to pursue what he saw as an unjust war so relentlessly, and to consider how citizens could resist their government's aggressive policies.

Career

In 1951, Cornell University's Philosophical Review published his "Schemeethical decision making. In the same magazine, he also wrote "Justice as Honesty" and "Sense of Justice".

In 1952 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at Oxford University. Here he worked with H. L. A. Hart, Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire. He returned to the United States of America, where he later became an assistant professor at Cornell University. By 1962, he became a professor at the same university and soon received a full-time position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, he decided to teach at Harvard, to which he devoted more than 30 years.

In 1963, he wrote a chapter titled "Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice" for Nomos, VI: Justice, the yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

In 1967 he wrote a chapter called "Distributive Justice" which was published in Philosophy, Politics and Society by Peter Laslett and W. J. Runciman. The following year, he wrote the article "Distributive Justice: Some Additions".

In 1971, he wrote The Theory of Justice, which was published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. It is considered one of his most important works on political philosophy and ethics.

In November 1974, he wrote an article en titled "Reply to Alexander and Musgrave" in the Economics Quarterly. In the same year, the American Economic Review published "Some Arguments formaximin criterion.”

In 1993, he released an updated version of The Theory of Justice called Political Liberalism. The work was published by Columbia University Press. In the same year, John Rawls wrote an article called "The Law of the Nations", which was published in Critical Inquiry.

In 2001, Justice as Honesty: A Confirmation was published in response to criticism of his book A Theory of Justice. The book was a summary of his philosophy, edited by Erin Kelly.

Private life

In 1949 he married Brown University graduate Margaret Fox. John Rawls himself did not like to give interviews and did not feel comfortable being in the spotlight. By his convictions, he was an atheist. In 1995, he suffered a series of strokes, after which he could no longer work.

He died at the age of 81 in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Scientific papers

Rawls's most talked about work is his theory of a just society. Rawls first laid out the idea of justice in detail in his 1971 book The Theory of Justice. He continued to refine this idea throughout his life. This theory has found its way into other books: John Rawls discusses it in Political Liberalism (1993), The Law of Nations (1999) and Justice as Honesty (2001).

The four roles of political philosophy

Rawls believes that political philosophyperforms at least four roles in the public life of society. The first role is practical: political philosophy can find grounds for informed agreement in a society where sharp divisions can lead to conflict. Rawls cites Leviathan Hobbes as an attempt to solve the problem of order during the English Civil War, and the Federalist Papers withdraw from the US Constitution debate.

The second role of political philosophy is to help citizens navigate their own social world. Philosophy can reflect on what it means to be a member of a certain society, and how one can understand the nature and history of this society in a broader perspective.

The third role is to explore the boundaries of practical political opportunity. Political philosophy should describe working political mechanisms that can be supported by real people. However, within these limits, philosophy can be utopian: it can portray a social order that is the best we can hope for. Given that people are what they are, as Rousseau said, philosophy represents what laws can be.

The fourth role of political philosophy is reconciliation: “to assuage our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us how its institutions … are rational and evolve over time, how they have reached their current, rational form . Philosophy can show that human life is not just dominationand cruelty, prejudice, stupidity and corruption.

John Rawls saw his own work as a practical contribution to overcoming longstanding tensions in democratic thought between liberty and equality and in limiting civil and international norms of tolerance. He invites members of his society to see themselves as free and equal citizens within a framework of just democratic politics and describes a hopeful vision of a consistently fair constitutional democracy that contributes to a peaceful international community. To individuals frustrated that their fellow citizens do not see the whole truth as they see it, Rawls offers the reconciling thought that this diversity of worldviews can maintain social order, in fact providing greater freedom for all.

Ideas of John Rawls' Theory of Justice

Briefly reviewing its concept, it should be noted that social cooperation in one form or another is necessary for citizens to lead a decent life. However, citizens are not indifferent to how the benefits and burdens of cooperation will be shared among them. John Rawls's principles of justice articulate the central liberal ideas that cooperation should be fair to all citizens who are considered free and equal. The distinctive interpretation he gives to these concepts can be seen as a combination of a negative and a positive thesis.

The negative thesis starts with a different idea. John Rawlsargues that citizens do not deserve to be born into a rich or poor family, to be born naturally more or less gifted than others, to be born female or male, to be born into a particular racial group, and so on. Because in this sense these personality traits are morally arbitrary, citizens are not en titled to more of the benefits of social cooperation simply because of them. For example, the fact that a citizen was born rich, white, and male does not in itself give grounds for that citizen to be approved by social institutions.

This negative thesis does not say how social goods should be distributed. Rawls' positive distributive thesis speaks of reciprocity based on equality. All social goods must be distributed equally unless unequal distribution is to the advantage of all. The main idea of John Rawls is that since citizens are basically equal, reasoning about fairness must begin with the assumption that goods produced in a cooperative should be shared equally.

Then justice requires that any inequality benefits all citizens and, in particular, benefits those who will have the least. Equality establishes a baseline; hence any inequality must improve the position of everyone, and especially the position of the most disadvantaged. These strict requirements of equality and mutual advantage are hallmarks that convey the essence of the theory of justice.

John Rawls: two basic points of the theory

The guiding ideas of justice are institutionalized by the two principles of justice.

According to the first of these, every person has the same inherent requirement for a fully adequate equal basic freedoms scheme that is compatible with the same freedoms scheme for all.

The second principle says that socio-economic inequality must satisfy two conditions:

1. They should be assigned to offices and positions open to all, under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.
2. They should be of the greatest benefit to the poorest members of society (principle of difference).

The first principle of equal fundamental freedoms must be embodied in a political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. The fulfillment of the first principle takes precedence over the fulfillment of the second principle, and within the framework of the second principle, fair equality of opportunity takes precedence over the principle of difference.

The first principle of John Rawls states that all citizens should have fundamental rights and freedoms: freedom of conscience and association, speech and personality, the right to vote, hold public office, be treated according to the rule of law, etc. He provides all this to all citizens equally. Unequal rights will not benefit those who receive a smaller share, so justice requires equal treatment for all under all normal circumstances.

John Rawls' Second Principle of Justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and the desire to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities, regardless of whether they were born rich or poor.

The second part is the difference principle, which governs the distribution of we alth and income. Resolving inequality in we alth and income can lead to an increase in the social product: for example, higher wages can cover the costs of training and education and can stimulate the creation of jobs that are more in demand. The principle of difference allows for inequality in we alth and income, provided that it benefits everyone, and especially those who are disadvantaged. The principle of difference requires that any economic inequality be most beneficial to those least disadvantaged.

Sequence of theories

For Rawls, political philosophy is not just an application of moral philosophy. Unlike the utilitarians, he has no universal principle: "The right regulative principle for anything," he says, "depends on his own nature of it." John Rawls's theory is limited to politics, and in this area he believes that the correct principles depend on its specific agents and limitations.