35 Facts About John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition.

John Rawls has often been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

John Rawls has the unusual distinction among contemporary political philosophers of being frequently cited by the courts of law in the United States and Canada and referred to by practising politicians in the United States and the United Kingdom.

John Rawls was born on February 21,1921, in Baltimore, Maryland.

John Rawls was the second of five sons born to William Lee Rawls, a prominent Baltimore attorney, and Anna Abell Stump Rawls.

John Rawls graduated in Baltimore before enrolling in the Kent School, an Episcopalian preparatory school in Connecticut.

At Princeton, John Rawls was influenced by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein's student.

In early 1946, John Rawls returned to Princeton to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy.

John Rawls married Margaret Warfield Fox, a Brown University graduate, in 1949.

John Rawls held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard.

John Rawls was, for a time, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

John Rawls was put forward for membership by Milton Friedman in 1968, and withdrew from the society three years later, just before his A Theory of Justice was published.

John Rawls rarely gave interviews and, having both a stutter and a "bat-like horror of the limelight," did not become a public intellectual despite his fame.

John Rawls instead remained committed mainly to his academic and family life.

John Rawls was nevertheless able to complete The Law of Peoples, the most complete statement of his views on international justice, and published in 2001 shortly before his death Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, a response to criticisms of A Theory of Justice.

John Rawls died on November 24,2002, at age 81, and was buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.

John Rawls was survived by his wife, Mard Rawls, and their four children, and four grandchildren.

The shape John Rawls's resolution took was not that of a balancing act that compromised or weakened the moral claim of one value compared with the other.

John Rawls posits two basic capacities that the individuals would know themselves to possess.

John Rawls's aspiration is to have created a thought experiment whereby a version of that process is carried to its completion, illuminating the correct standpoint a person should take in his or her thinking about justice.

In setting out his theory, John Rawls described his method as one of "reflective equilibrium," a concept which has since been used in other areas of philosophy.

John Rawls derives two principles of justice from the original position.

John Rawls argues that a second principle of equality would be agreed upon to guarantee liberties that represent meaningful options for all in society and ensure distributive justice.

John Rawls held that these principles of justice apply to the "basic structure" of fundamental social institutions, a qualification that has been the source of some controversy and constructive debate.

John Rawls further argued that these principles were to be 'lexically ordered' to award priority to basic liberties over the more equality-oriented demands of the second principle.

In Political Liberalism, John Rawls turned towards the question of political legitimacy in the context of intractable philosophical, religious, and moral disagreement amongst citizens regarding the human good.

The task of justification falls to what John Rawls called the "reasonable comprehensive doctrines" and the citizens who subscribe to them.

John Rawls's concern is with whether or not the idea of political legitimacy fleshed out in terms of the duty of civility and mutual justification can serve as a viable form of public discourse in the face of the religious and moral pluralism of modern democratic society, not with justifying this conception of political legitimacy in the first place.

John Rawls modified the principles of justice as follows :.

John Rawls argued that the legitimacy of a liberal international order is contingent on tolerating decent peoples, which differ from liberal peoples, among other ways, in that they might have state religions and deny adherents of minority faiths the right to hold positions of power within the state, and might organize political participation via consultation hierarchies rather than elections.

John Rawls denied that his principles should be so applied, partly on the grounds that a world state does not exist and would not be stable.

John Rawls argued, among other things, that continuing to give aid indefinitely would see nations with industrious populations subsidize those with idle populations and would create a moral hazard problem where governments could spend irresponsibly in the knowledge that they will be bailed out by those nations who had spent responsibly.

John Rawls controversially claimed that violations of human rights can legitimize military intervention in the violating states, though he expressed the hope that such societies could be induced to reform peacefully by the good example of liberal and decent peoples.

John Rawls consistently held the view that naturally developed skills and endowments could not be neatly distinguished from inherited ones, and that neither could be used to justify moral desert.

The late philosopher G A Cohen, along with political scientist Jon Elster, and John Roemer, used Rawls's writings extensively to inaugurate the Analytical Marxism movement in the 1980s.