A Theory of Justice

John Rawls (1921-2002) was a moral and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. He was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore, Maryland, and died on November 24, 2002, in Lexington, Massachusetts. He studied at Princeton University, completing his undergraduate studies before serving in the US Army during World War II. After the war, he returned to Princeton, earning his doctorate in philosophy in 1950. As a professor, Rawls taught at various institutions, including Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and ultimately Harvard University, where he spent most of his career.

Rawls’s work is most famously associated with his 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. Here, Rawls introduced the concept of “justice as fairness,” which sought to establish principles of justice that could reconcile the demands of liberty and equality in a democratic society. His use of the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance” as thought experiments to determine just principles marked a significant departure from utilitarianism, which had previously dominated Anglo-American moral philosophy. Rawls’s theory emphasized the importance of individual rights and proposed that inequalities should only be permitted if they benefit the least advantaged members of society.

Rawls’s later works, including Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999), further explored the implications of his theories for pluralistic societies and international relations.