When John Rawls died in 2002, the world lost the most important English-speaking philosopher of his generation. His obituary in The Guardian said Rawls “more or less singlehandedly rejuvenated and transformed the study of political philosophy.”
Apropos for this special issue of Experience, Rawls’s most studied and renowned book is A Theory of Justice (1971). Over 2,000 publications have discussed the book, and at present, it is a rare work of political philosophy that does not address Rawls’s magisterial book at length.
By common consensus, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice provides a sturdy philosophical foundation for Western-style liberal democracy, that is, a type of government that features free elections, separate branches of government, and a rule of law that guards the rights and freedoms of all citizens. But alas, in our nerve-racking moment of history, Rawls’s theory of justice and the type of government it buoys are under direct and indirect attack by authoritarian figures in the United States and in other countries of the world.
Rawls, the son of a prominent attorney, grew up in Baltimore. He battled to overcome a stutter and agonized as two younger brothers died from diseases they had contracted from him. One brother, seven-year-old Bobby, had contracted diphtheria. Tommy, another brother, caught pneumonia from Rawls.
Rawls attended Princeton in the later years of the Great Depression. His precocious, 181-page undergraduate thesis was titled “The Meaning of Sin and Faith.” It drew on arguments in Karl Marx’s “The Jewish Question” and wrestled with whether natural inequality could be a valid factor in distributing wealth.
After graduating from Princeton, Rawls served in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific. After surviving the horrors of trench warfare, he was awarded the Bronze Star. He said later that the carnage he had witnessed caused him to abandon his Christian faith and become an atheist.
Following World War II, Rawls served in General Douglas McArthur’s occupying force in the Philippines, but once again, misfortune plagued him. When he refused to punish another soldier for supposed misconduct, he was demoted and disgraced. He left the military in January 1946.
Rawls then returned to the United States and to his alma mater, entering a Ph.D. program in moral philosophy. He completed a dissertation titled “A Study in the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge,” which predictably sported an equally impressive subtitle, namely, “Considered with Reference to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character.”
His dissertation and Ph.D. led to a Fulbright Fellowship at Oxford, and teaching appointments at Cornell and M.I.T followed. Ambitiously climbing the rungs of the academic ladder in philosophy, he then arrived at Harvard in 1962, where he remained for almost 40 years.
Rawls’s acclaim and accomplishments might have enabled him to become a proverbial public intellectual, but he chose not to pursue that path. Indeed, he shunned the limelight and why not? He had bigger fish to fry: explaining what justice might be in the legal order of Western-style liberal democracy.
A rising star in philosophy, Rawls published widely, with critics and commentators being most struck by his A Theory of Justice. The work first appeared as an immense 500-page tome in 1971. Sensitive to criticism, Rawls wrote and rewrote the work for decades, but A Theory of Justice remained largely intact through the thirty years between its initial publication and Rawls’s death.
The work begins with Rawls’s human beings assembled in what he calls the “original position,” a construct similar to but not the same as the state of nature envisioned by such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. While human beings in the state of nature are sometimes contentious and hungry for one another’s property and possessions, Rawls’s human beings in their original position are peaceful and prepared to reason their way to the true principles of justice.
What is particularly noteworthy about the men and, presumably, the women in the original position is that they wear what Rawls calls a “veil of ignorance.” It is an unusual veil, to say the least, because it shields the wearers not so much from those around them as from themselves. The veil covers them so completely that they cannot know anything about who they themselves are!
Rawls’s thinking is that people who do not know who they are would not ultimately tailor the principles of justice to serve their own interests. Nobody knows anything about their gender, race, socioeconomic status, or place in society. Nobody knows anything about their strength and intelligence, their skills and abilities, their backgrounds, and prospects. This “ignorance” enables the assembled to discover what is genuinely fair for one and all.
Rawls’s creative run-up to the principles in his theory of justice might give one pause. Just how “ignorant” could people truly be? After all, they presumably enter the original position knowing something about how to function in the world. They might magically be able to cover up information about themselves as individuals, but could they ever cover up the knowledge of how individuals work together?
Furthermore, ignorance about identity and social status might not be the best way to sort out what is just. The rich and the poor, whites and people of color, and men and women might as groups be inclined to see the world differently. Might it therefore make better sense to bring representative human beings together and have them argue and reason together on the informed rather than ignorant side of the veil?
Rawls might acknowledge that is a more realistic possibility, but don’t forget, he would add, that his mission is not an attempt to describe how human beings might actually set up a government. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice hopes to capture nothing less than a philosophically sound understanding of justice.
When Rawls’s human beings assemble in the original position and don their veils of ignorance, they strive to articulate a fair and workable conception of justice. Perhaps not surprisingly, the topics on which they focus are perennials: liberty and equality, with liberty coming first. Rawls insists on this serial order because if human beings know that an entire system of liberty is in place and certain to endure, they will not be tempted to trade parts of their liberty for the advantages of wealth.
Rawls’s system of liberty rests on the principle of the greatest liberty for all. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of basic liberties compatible with a system of liberty for everybody.
What are these liberties? Rawls does not dwell on them, but they are familiar. The major liberties are freedom of thought, conscience, speech, and assembly. Fairness in criminal proceedings and participation in the political process through voting and running for office also belong on the list. Interestingly enough, the freedom to own property is not included, regardless of what the drafters of the concluding sentences of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States might have assumed.
Overall, liberties are to be balanced in a system. Nobody is to have greater liberty than someone else, and one person’s exercise of liberty is not to reduce another person’s liberty. It would be inconceivable, for example, to vote people into peonage, much less into slavery.
Rawls’s second fundamental principle, which considers equality, has proven more controversial. Rawls maintained that in a just society, unequal socioeconomic advantages and benefits can be awarded only if their distribution improves the condition of the worst-off.
Although this so-called “difference principle” does not amount to absolute socioeconomic equality, it nudges society in that direction and might reduce problems resulting from unequal generational wealth. Rawls does not maintain that advantages and benefits acquired through talent, inheritance, or luck deserve to be protected or even prioritized. In fact, redress is appropriate given these types of arbitrary inequality.
The primary benefits and advantages that might be distributed to the least well-off would of course include income, opportunity, and wealth, and they could also less predictably include education, health, and housing. One contemporary proposal that seems to match what Rawls had in mind involves the cancellation of student loan indebtedness but only for those with incomes below a certain poverty line.
Rawls’s bold and confident vision of justice invades one’s political consciousness, and the vision, not surprisingly, has prompted criticism from both the left and the right. Each set of critics has seen Rawls as system-supporting, with the system being Western-style liberal democracy.
Viewed from the political left, Rawls’s vision of how human beings might reason their way to a just society seems at least naïve and, at worst, willfully disingenuous. After all, aren’t all human societies that have existed and continue to exist unequal and, to some extent, exploitative? Surely, this is the case in modern bourgeois society with its lionizing of private property and the market economy and its acceptance of patriarchy, racist oppression, and pervasive socioeconomic inequality. Those arriving at the original position and ready to don their veils of ignorance, one assumes, hail from this type of society and carry its values and assumptions along with them.
Furthermore, a leftist, such as the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, for example, might say that Rawls’s endorsement of maximum liberty and cautious steps toward equality could never be enough to achieve a truly just society. Indeed, Rawls acknowledges that some degree of inequality will continue to exist in a just society. He fails to appreciate the need for greater human connectedness and the potential of democratic collectivism.
Critics on the right, for example, the second-generation libertarian Rand Paul, might also be skeptical of the decisions that could made in the original position. Is it likely, a conservative might ask, that human beings would opt for a society edging toward socioeconomic equality? Even if their veils of ignorance prevented them from knowing who they were as individuals, human beings would presumably appreciate the scrambling for success that is the norm in a successful society. Human beings might prefer to take their chances rather than potentially make sacrifices for the good of others.
As for Rawls’s reigning principles, the so-called “difference principle” would trouble a conservative more than what Rawls had to say about maximizing liberty. The difference principle does not champion equality of opportunity but rather calls for distributing wealth to the less fortunate. Indeed, from a conservative perspective, Rawls appears to be endorsing a variety of - horrors - the welfare state.
Confronted by these criticisms, Rawlsians might have little recourse but to shrug their shoulders. Suggesting an original position in which those present wear veils of ignorance is a thought experiment. A Theory of Justice merely attempts to set the stage for rational thinking about liberty and equality. The work is not a political program.
A bigger challenge to Rawls’s theory of justice, meanwhile, comes from the authoritarian politicians and regimes that have emerged in recent decades in the United States and in countries such as France, Hungary, Italy, Israel, and South Korea. Authoritarians’ foundational principles hardly involve the commitments to liberty and equality that Rawls articulated. In fact, authoritarians often play off doubts about such principles.
Rawls transcends such doubts and gives us the most fundamental philosophical principles of liberal democracy. If one hopes to guard against the collapse of liberal democracy, it might be time to reassert the principles of liberty and equality that are at the heart of Rawls’s theory of justice. Holding firmly to these principles might be our best protection against the menace of authoritarianism.
