An Introduction to Rawls on Justice

For almost fifty years, the work of John Rawls (1921–2002) has played a central and guiding role in the development of Anglo-American political philosophy. This is certainly not to say that his views have been uncritically accepted. On the contrary, an enormous literature has been generated criticizing and explaining where Rawls goes wrong. But each of Rawls’s three major books, A Theory of Justice, first published in 1971 (revised edition 1999), Political Liberalism, first published in 1993 (expanded edition 2005), and The Law of Peoples, first published in 1999, set the agenda for many other philosophers’ major research projects.1 In this introduction, we provide only the barest overview of the key ideas of his first two majors volumes, with discussions of The Law of Peoples found in the introductions to Parts IX and X. Rawls’s aim in his first major book, A Theory of Justice, is to identify principles of justice for guiding the basic terms of cooperation within a society. In particular, he wants to offer an alternative to utilitarianism, which he argues cannot “provide a satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of free and equal persons.”2 Rawls was immensely successful in establishing “justice as fairness” as at least a credible alternative to utilitarianism. In addition to defending nonutilitarian principles for evaluating social justice, he also developed a distinctive method of justifying them, an account of moral psychology and development, and much else. But there were important limitations and simplifying assumptions that Rawls explicitly noted. For example, he was narrow in his focus on principles of justice for evaluating the “basic structure of society”—the system formed by a society’s basic social institutions—rather than other possible objects of evaluation, such as the justice of particular laws and policies. And he put aside (until The Law of Peoples) questions about the justice of relations among different societies. He also said little about the transition from an existing society with its injustices of various kinds and degrees to a more just arrangement. He believed that the distinctive contribution that philosophers could make was to develop and defend principles to be used in evaluation, but that the application of these principles to actual societies and the consideration of the implications of various alternative arrangements depend on the kinds of expertise that political scientists, economists, sociologists, historians, and others could provide. Social critique is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with philosophers having an important but limited role.