Rawls, John, 1921-2002

John Rawls (1921-2002), James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, was one of the most significant political and moral philosophers of the twentieth century and is credited with reviving the social contract tradition in social and moral philosophy. Rawls's theories of a just liberal society, known as justice as fairness, greatly influenced the fields of political science, economics, sociology, theology, and the law.

John Rawls (1921-2002), James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, was one of the most significant political and moral philosophers of the twentieth century and is credited with reviving the social contract tradition in social and moral philosophy. Widely cited by scholars, Rawls's theories on justice and fairness in a modern society greatly influenced the fields of political science, economics, sociology, theology, and the law.

John Bordley Rawls was born on February 21, 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, to William Lee Rawls (1883-1946) and Anna Abel (Stump) Rawls (1892-1954). The second of five sons, Rawls's interest in philosophy began at the Episcopalian Kent School in Connecticut and matured as an undergraduate at Princeton University. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1943, Rawls enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, trained as a radio operator, and served as an infantry platoon sergeant in the Pacific, in New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan. Following his discharge from the military, Rawls attended the Princeton University Graduate School (1946-1950), spending the year 1947-1948 at Cornell University. From 1952 to 1953, Rawls studied at Christ Church College at Oxford University. After returning from England, Rawls was appointed an Assistant and then an Associate Professor at Cornell University.

Rawls first came to Harvard University in 1959 as a Visiting Professor. While at Harvard, Rawls accepted a full professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he helped to develop the Institute's Humanities Department. In 1962, Rawls left MIT to join the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he stayed until his retirement in 1991. Rawls taught moral, social, and political philosophy, focusing on discussions of justice as fairness in society, with examinations of earlier philosopher's works on the subject. He taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses at Harvard, but his most influential course was on ethics or moral philosophy in which he reviewed the works of some of the major philosophers of Western Civilization including Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, John Locke, Henry Sidgwick, and W.D. Ross. In Rawls's view, studying the greatest minds of philosophy offered the best hope of understanding some of the important questions asked by individuals during their lifetimes, including what makes a human life worthwhile.

Rawls's research and teaching focused on justice in society, a topic which he studied for over fifty years. He began researching and collecting notes on justice and fairness as a graduate student at Princeton University. In 1971, he published his seminal work, A Theory of Justice, which proposed an alternative to utilitarianism, which in Rawls's view led to injustice. For Rawls, the utilitarian doctrine lacked any principle of justice and could quite easily be turned into a system where the welfare of the few was sacrificed for the welfare of the many. Rawls revived the seventeenth century idea of the social contract, a doctrine popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rawls postulated that a just and fair society was one in which each person had equal opportunities and freedom and that government had a responsibility to address economic and social disparities in order to assist and uplift the disadvantaged. Rawls's theory of justice was received favorably by philosophers, lawyers, economists, political scientists, sociologists, students, and other academicians, and led to an outpouring of journal literature and papers.

After the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls spent the next several years developing and expanding his ideas of justice and fairness by exploring ways in which different approaches to morality could co-exist in a democratic society holding diverse world views. In Political Liberalism (1993), he addressed how a concept of justice influences the lives of citizens in a democracy, specifically addressing the relationship and compatibility between religion and democracy. In The Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls extended his conception of justice to foreign affairs, describing what a peaceful and tolerant international order would look like. Finally, Rawls summarized his conceptions of justice in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), providing revisions to his original ideas on justice and fairness, reworked over a period of almost thirty years. Rawls's writings had a profound effect on philosophical discussion and discourse in the second half of the twentieth century and greatly influenced a generation of moral and social philosophers.

In 1949 John Rawls married Margaret (Warfield Fox) Rawls. They had four children: Anne Warefield (b. 1950), Robert Lee (b. 1954), Alexander Emory (b. 1955), and Elizabeth Fox (b. 1957).

John Rawls died on November 24, 2002.