John Rawls (1921–2002)
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In the late 1930s, an anxious teenager sits in a boarding school in Connecticut, surrounded by the trappings of privilege he doesn’t quite know what to do with. The school is Kent, Episcopalian and elite, a feeder into the American establishment. The boy’s days are filled with chapel services, Latin, math, sports, and the casual assumption that people like him will one day help run things. He is shy, serious, and introspective. The world outside his campus is sliding toward catastrophe — the rise of fascism, economic turmoil, the approach of war — but inside the routines of American upper-class life continue. The boy’s name is John Bordley Rawls, and he will spend the second half of the twentieth century trying to answer one basic question: what does a just society look like, if we take seriously the fact that no one really deserves the starting position they’re born into?
Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, into a professional, comfortable family. His father was a prominent lawyer; his mother was active in civic and women’s organizations. There were five Rawls boys, and for a time the household must have felt full of energy and promise. Then, in quick succession, tragedy struck: when John was still a child, two of his younger brothers died from illnesses they contracted, probably from him. One died of pneumonia after catching diphtheria; another of an infection after catching measles. It is hard to overstate how scarring this would be for a child: to see brothers die from diseases that passed through your own body. Rawls rarely spoke about this later, but friends and biographers have seen in it a source of the deep sensitivity to guilt, chance, and undeserved misfortune that runs underneath his philosophy.
He went on to Princeton as an undergraduate, where he studied philosophy and wrote an early senior thesis influenced by religious ethics. At that stage, he was still devout, thinking in terms of a personal God and a moral order grounded in Christianity. Then war intervened. Rawls entered the U.S. Army in 1943, served as an infantryman in the Pacific, and saw combat in the Philippines. He witnessed the aftermath of brutal fighting; he saw bodies; he saw civilians caught in the gears of war. In 1945, his unit was slated for the invasion of Japan, but then the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war ended in a way that felt both relieving and morally disorienting. Around the same time, Rawls visited the remains of Hiroshima as a soldier, seeing the devastation with his own eyes. He was profoundly shaken by what he regarded as an unjustifiable act, even in the context of war. Shortly thereafter, he declined an offer to become an officer and left the army as a private.
Those years altered him. He gradually lost his religious faith, not in a dramatic gesture of rebellion but in a slow erosion of confidence. Yet he did not become a cynic. Instead, the questions that had once been framed in theological language — about justice, evil, responsibility — migrated into a secular register. When he returned to Princeton for graduate study after the war, he brought with him a determination to think seriously about how societies should be organized if human beings are to treat each other fairly, given the realities of luck, power, and vulnerability he had seen up close.
For the next several decades, Rawls lived the life of a working academic — teaching first at Cornell, then at MIT, and finally, for most of his career, at Harvard. He was not a charismatic performer in the classroom. Students remember a tall man who spoke in a somewhat halting, careful way, often looking down at his notes, correcting himself mid-sentence. He could be intense, shy, and socially awkward. But there was a steadiness and moral seriousness in him that drew people in. He did not cultivate the image of a philosophical star. He spent years revising the same manuscript, reworking arguments until they felt right. He was, in temperament, the opposite of a polemicist. Yet the book that emerged from this slow labor, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, would reset the terms of Anglophone moral and political philosophy for a generation.
To understand why, you have to step back into the intellectual landscape Rawls was confronting. In the mid-twentieth century, two big currents dominated. On one side, in political and moral thought, utilitarianism was widely influential: the view that the right action or policy is the one that maximizes overall welfare or happiness, summed across individuals. It was flexible, apparently scientific, and could be stated in clean formulas. On the other side, there was a growing tendency in analytic philosophy to be suspicious of “moral facts” altogether, treating value judgments as expressions of emotion or preference rather than as claims that could be true or false. Talk of justice sometimes began to look like mere rhetoric hiding underlying power struggles.
At the same time, in the real world, liberal democracies were struggling with civil rights, decolonization, economic inequality, and the Cold War. Philosophically, it was not clear what liberalism — the tradition of rights, constitutionalism, and individual freedom — really rested on. Was it just a convenient compromise, a historical accident, or did it have a moral backbone that could withstand both totalitarian ideology and pure market logic? Rawls wanted to rescue the idea of justice as something more than a slogan, to show that there are principled reasons to prefer certain basic structures of society over others.
His central strategy in A Theory of Justice is deceptively simple. If we want to know what a just society looks like, he says, we should ask: what principles of justice would free and rational people choose to govern the basic structure of their society if they didn’t yet know who they were going to be within that society? That thought experiment — the “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” — has become one of the most famous devices in modern political theory.
Imagine yourself, he says, in an initial situation of choice. You are about to negotiate, with others, the fundamental rules that will regulate major institutions: the political constitution, the legal system, economic arrangements, the distribution of rights and duties. But you do so behind a veil of ignorance: you do not know your own class, race, gender, religion, talents, or social status. You do not know your particular conception of the good life — whether you’re an artist, a businessperson, a scientist, a parent, a monk. You do not know whether you will be healthy or chronically ill, disabled or able-bodied, born into a loving family or a broken one, psychologically resilient or fragile. You know only general facts about human beings and societies. You know, for instance, that people tend to care about their own interests, that resources are limited, that there are typical patterns of discrimination and domination. You also know basic rationality: you want to secure for yourself, whatever you turn out to be, as good a life prospect as possible.
The idea is that this veil of ignorance strips away morally irrelevant advantages and biases. In real life, our sense of justice is often distorted by the position we already occupy. The wealthy can be tempted to rationalize inequality; the privileged can downplay structural barriers; the powerful can treat their power as deserved. The worse-off can be tempted toward envy or to demand impossible standards of equality. Behind the veil, you do not know whether you are going to end up on top or at the bottom. You cannot rig the rules in your own favor, because you don’t know who “you” will be. You have to choose principles that, as a rational agent facing uncertainty, you can live with from any position.
Rawls argues that people in the original position would choose two principles of justice. First: each person is to have an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties — liberty of conscience, freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, the right to vote and run for office, protections under the rule of law — and this scheme must be compatible with the same set of liberties for all. Basic rights cannot be sacrificed to increase overall efficiency or happiness. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (a) they are attached to positions and offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) they work to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. This latter part is what he calls the difference principle.
The first principle reflects a deeply liberal intuition: there is a core set of freedoms that define citizens as free and equal, and these cannot simply be traded off for more wealth or stability. You cannot, for example, justify censorship or political repression by pointing to economic gains, at least not under a just arrangement. The integrity of the person and the status of citizen have priority. The second principle accepts that some inequalities in income, wealth, and authority are compatible with justice — and may even be desirable — but only under strict conditions. Opportunities must genuinely be open: not just formal equality of rights, but substantive fair access to education, jobs, and political influence. And inequalities are justified only if they raise the floor: if the worst-off are better off than they would be under any feasible, more equal arrangement.
Behind the veil of ignorance, Rawls thinks, people will reason in a risk-averse way about their own prospects. Since you might turn out to be among the least advantaged, you will want to guarantee that, if that happens, your position is as good as possible. You won’t be satisfied with a system that produces huge wealth at the top and desperate poverty at the bottom, even if the average is high, because you might be at the bottom. Nor will you agree to a regime that protects your liberty only if you happen to belong to the majority or the dominant group. You will want robust basic rights for everyone, regardless of their eventual identity.
Morally, the original position and the veil of ignorance dramatize a Kantian idea: that persons, as free and rational beings, should not be treated merely as means to others’ ends but as ends in themselves. The question “what principles could we all endorse as free and equal?” becomes the test of justice. The device is not a description of an actual historical contract; it is a way of modeling fairness. It asks you, as a listener, to perform a mental shift: to stop thinking about justice primarily from the perspective of your current role and to inhabit, at least imaginatively, a universal standpoint.
Rawls is especially concerned to show how his two principles compare with utilitarianism. The utilitarian might say: a just society is one that maximizes total or average happiness. If, by putting a heavy burden on a minority, we can greatly increase the happiness of the majority, that could be justified. Rawls finds this unacceptable. Behind the veil of ignorance, you would not agree to a principle that allows you to be sacrificed for others’ greater sum of welfare. You might be that minority. For him, justice is not an aggregate calculation; it is about how institutions respect the separate person, the life of each individual. The difference principle is therefore not a veiled form of utilitarianism; it focuses on the worst-off, not on the sum or average.
Consider a concrete example. Suppose a certain economic arrangement, call it System A, produces a fairly equal distribution of income, but at a modest level. Another system, System B, allows entrepreneurs to become very rich and creates significant inequalities, but it also leads to innovations and economic growth that raise the living standards of the poor substantially above what they would enjoy under System A. Under Rawls’s difference principle, System B could be just — despite the inequalities — if and only if the worst-off are indeed better off under B than under A, and if positions in B are genuinely open under fair equality of opportunity. The point is not to crush incentive or difference; it is to ask, relentlessly: what happens to those at the bottom?
This focus on the basic structure — the big institutional patterns that shape life chances — is central. Rawls is not primarily writing a manual for individual virtue, though he touches on character. He wants to know what a society’s background rules must look like if, over time, they are to distribute rights, opportunities, and resources in a way that respects citizens as free and equal. Tax policies, school systems, labor markets, property law, political procedures: all of these belong to the basic structure. His principles are meant as standards to evaluate and guide them, not as direct instructions for every daily choice.
Rawls is aware that real societies are pluralistic. People hold different religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines. They disagree, sometimes profoundly, about the meaning of life, the nature of the good, and the shape of the virtues. A just liberal society, he thinks, cannot be based on any one comprehensive doctrine that everyone must accept. Instead, it must seek an “overlapping consensus”: people with different worldviews can agree, for their own reasons, on certain political principles of justice that regulate public life, while continuing to differ privately and in civil society about deeper metaphysical or theological questions.
This concern becomes central in his later work, especially Political Liberalism. There he revises and extends his earlier theory to address a question that troubled him: how can a conception of justice remain stable over time in a society marked by what he calls the “fact of reasonable pluralism”? That is, how can citizens who reasonably disagree about ultimate truths still see themselves as bound by the same fair terms of cooperation? His answer rests on the idea of public reason: when deciding fundamental political questions — constitutional essentials, basic justice — citizens and officials should offer one another reasons that others, as free and equal, could reasonably accept, regardless of their particular doctrines. You may be moved personally, for example, by religious beliefs, but when justifying law on issues of basic justice, you should be able to translate your arguments into a language accessible to others who do not share your faith.
There is a moral discipline here. It asks citizens to see themselves not as members of a tribe struggling for dominance, but as participants in a shared project of self-government. It also sets limits on what can count as a legitimate exercise of political power. Laws that deeply burden some citizens’ fundamental interests must be justifiable, in terms of political values like freedom, equality, and fairness, to those very citizens. Majorities cannot simply impose their comprehensive doctrine on minorities and call it justice.
Critics have argued that Rawls underestimates the depth of conflict, that he is too optimistic about the possibility of overlapping consensus, or that his view of public reason excludes too much. Others have claimed that his focus on ideal theory — imagining a “well-ordered society” where everyone broadly accepts the principles of justice — ignores urgent questions of non-ideal justice: structural racism, colonial legacies, gender oppression, environmental catastrophe. Rawls himself acknowledged that his theory was a first step, an attempt to articulate what a just basic structure would look like under favorable conditions, so that we could then ask how far and by what means to move our actually existing societies in that direction.
Behind the abstractions, there is always the man who had seen war, who had lost brothers, who knew how arbitrary life can be. One small story captures something of his character. Colleagues recall that when Rawls was walking across campus and saw a student or junior faculty member approaching, he would sometimes cross the street to avoid the encounter — not out of arrogance, but out of shyness and worry that they would feel pressured to talk to him. He was intensely self-critical, often dissatisfied with his own writings, revising and reworking them late into life. A Theory of Justice itself went through major revisions, and he continued to produce restatements and clarifications of his view decades after its publication.
Morally, his emphasis on fairness and on the arbitrariness of fortune can be read as a sustained protest against the idea that those who succeed materially or socially simply “deserve” everything they get. Rawls distinguishes between what he calls “moral desert” and “entitlement under just institutions.” Your natural talents — intelligence, charisma, physical ability — and the social circumstances that nurture them are, as he likes to say, “arbitrary from the moral point of view.” You do not choose your genetic endowment; you do not choose your family of origin. If those advantages lead you to a lucrative career, the fact that you exercised effort and made intelligent choices matters, but those efforts operate against a background you did nothing to create. Therefore, it is misleading to say you simply deserve your income in some deep moral sense.
Instead, Rawls suggests, we should think in terms of fair cooperation: we collectively agree on institutions that define what counts as a legitimate claim to income, wealth, and status, under principles of justice that take everyone’s position into account. Within that framework, you may be entitled to your earnings legally and legitimately. But that entitlement is always conditional on the justice of the background rules, including the difference principle. If those rules are unjust, then appeals to “what I deserve” lose their force.
This perspective cuts against both laissez-faire libertarianism and certain forms of moralistic meritocracy. To the libertarian who says “taxation is theft because I own myself and my talents absolutely,” Rawls replies that the very markets in which you exercise your talents, the legal protections you enjoy, the education that made your skills possible, are social products. Justice therefore requires that the design of those institutions benefit all, especially the least advantaged, not just those who happen to win the race. To the meritocrat who says “the rich are simply the deserving winners of fair competition,” Rawls replies that even in a fair competition, the starting blocks are not set by the runners. We must always ask whether the competition itself is justly structured and what happens to those who, through no fault of their own, lose.
For your series, Rawls marks a modern pivot: away from questions about the metaphysical nature of the soul or the will, toward a focus on institutions, fairness, and the conditions of pluralist democracy. He stands downstream from Kant, with his emphasis on persons as ends in themselves, and from the social contract tradition, with its focus on consent and hypothetical agreement. But he reshapes those themes for a world in which citizens disagree deeply, markets are powerful, and the state is expected to do more than simply keep the peace. His notion that justice is the “first virtue of social institutions” — that no amount of efficiency or wealth can justify injustice — has become a kind of secular creed for many.
Imagine him in his office at Harvard in the late 1960s, the campus alive with protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Outside, students argue about revolution, reform, draft resistance. Inside, Rawls sits at his desk, revising a chapter on the original position. He is not a movement leader or a street activist; his temperament leans toward slow thought, not quick slogans. Yet his work is animated by the same sense that something is deeply off in how power and opportunity are distributed. He wants to give those intuitions about injustice a structure they can stand on, a framework that can survive changes of regime, mood, and fashion.
He knows that philosophy alone will not end racism, poverty, or war. But he also believes that without clear ideas about what a just basic structure would be, our efforts at reform will be directionless and easily co-opted. His original position and veil of ignorance are a kind of moral technology, a device you can pick up, in your own head, to test your instincts. Would I still accept this arrangement if I didn’t know whether I’d be born into the majority or the minority, into wealth or poverty, into power or marginalization? If the answer is no, something in the arrangement is suspect.
As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, Rawls’s own health declined. He suffered a series of strokes that affected his ability to speak and work. Yet he kept writing, with the help of students and colleagues, refining his ideas about justice, law of peoples, and the possibility of decent hierarchical societies in a global order. He died in 2002, quietly, at home in Lexington, Massachusetts. There were no grand political victories attached to his name, no revolutions. What he left instead was a pattern of argument, a set of concepts, and a moral tone: serious, measured, insistent that, even in a world full of arbitrary suffering, we can do better at structuring our common life.
In a time when political discourse often collapses into team sports and mutual contempt, Rawls’s work offers a different posture. It invites you to imagine yourself as one citizen among many, none of whom chose their starting point, all of whom have to share a world. It asks you to step behind the veil, even for a moment, and consider what rules you could live with if you had no guarantee that the coin of fortune would land on your side. That exercise is not just an intellectual game. It is, in his sense, a moral discipline: a way of training the imagination toward fairness.