Profile Major Works Resources

John Rawls, 1921-2002

 

Modern Harvard philosopher.  In his most famous and influential book, Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls proposed a new theory of social welfare.  Rawls theory is based on the the idea of "original position", a mental exercise whereby a group of rational people must establish a principle of fairness (such as distribution of income) without knowing beforehand where on the resulting pecking order they will end up themselves ("veil of ignorance"). Rawls used this device to argue that the optimal arrangement will be to "maximize the welfare of society's worse-off member".  Rawls's theory effectively justifies an egalitarian "no-substitution" social welfare function.

 

  

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Major works of John Rawls

  • "Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics", 1951, Philosophical Review 
  • "Two Concepts of Rules" 1955, Philosophical Review
  • "Justice as Fairness", 1957, J of Philosophy
  • "The Sense of Justice", 1963, Philosophical Review
  • "Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice" 1963,  Friedrich and Chapman, eds., Nomos, VI: Justice
  • "Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play", 1964, in S. Hook, ed., Law and Philosophy
  • "Distributive Justice", 1967,  in Laslett and Runciman, eds., Philosophy, Politics, and Society
  • "The Justification of Civil Disobedience", 1969, in Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience
  • Theory of Justice, 1971.
  • "Justice as Reciprocity", 1971, in Gorovitz, ed., Utilitarianism
  • "Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play", 1971, in Murphy, ed., Civil Disobedience and Violence
  • "Some Reasons for the Maximin Criterion", 1974, AER
  • "Fairness to Goodness", 1975, Philosophical Review
  • "A Kantian Conception of Equality", 1975, Cambridge Review
  • "The Basic Structure as Subject.", 1977, American Philosophical Quarterly
  • "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory" 1980, Journal of Philosophy
  • "The Basic Liberties and Their Priority", 1982, in McMurrin, ed., Tanner Lectures on Human Values
  • "Social Unity and Primary Goods", 1982,  in A. Sen and B. Wiliams, eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond
  • "The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus", 1987, Oxford Journal for Legal Studies
  • "The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.", 1988, Philosophy & Public Affairs 
  • "The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus", 1989, NYU Law Review
  • "Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy", 1989, in Forster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deductions
  • The Law of Peoples", 1993, Critical Inquiry
  • Political Liberalism, 1993
  • The Law of the Peoples, 1999
  • Collected Papers, 1999
  • Lecture on the History of Moral Philosophy, with Barbara Hermann, 2000

 
HET

 
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Resources on John Rawls

  • John Rawls obituary at Harvard Gazette
  • Rawls obituary at NY Times, 2002
  • Rawls obituary in the Guardian
  • "John Rawls and Justice as Fairness" by Loren A. King [pdf]
  • "Portrait: John Rawls" by Ben Rogers, 1999, Prospect [online]
  • "Behind the Veil: John Rawls's Revival of Liberalism", by Ben Rogers, Lingua Franca
  • "John Rawls: A Calvinist After-Image" by Michael Weinstein, 1993 [cnet]
  • "John Rawls's Political Liberalism" by Ted Vaggalis [online]
  • "Notes on the contrast between Habermas and Rawls" by Thomas McCarthy, 1994 [online]
  • "Rawls’s Strangely Apolitical Political Liberalism" by Thomas Bridges [online]
  • "Rawlsian Reasonableness and the Creation of Citizens" by Thomas Bridges [online]
  • "Rawls and the Rethinking of the Priority of the Right over the Good" by Thomas Bridges [online]
  • "Post-Metaphysical Liberalism: The Case of Rawls" by Thomas Bridges [online]
  • "John Rawls: Liberty" by R.J. Kilcullen 
  • "Outline of Theory of Justice" by Darrell Huwe [online]
  • Rawls page at Applied Ethics
  • "The Great Philosophers: John Rawls" and Philosophers Mail [online]
  • "Rawls's new theory of justice", by Rex Martin, 1994 [pdf]
  • "John Rawls and Moral Vocation of Liberalism" by John Burt, 2002 [pdf]
  • "Rawls's political conception of rights and liberties: an illiberal but pragmatic approach to the problems of harmonization and globalization", by Paul de Hert and Serge Gutwirth, 2003  [pdf]
  • "Veil of Influence: the legacy of John Rawls", by Michael Saward, 2003 [pdf]
  • John Rawls' Mature Theory of Social Justice by Jan Garrett, 2005 [online]
  • "John Rawls: Between two enlightenments", by M. Frazer in 2007 [pdf]
  • John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice by John Pogge, 2007
    Review of Pogge's Rawls by Arthur Kuflik [oline]
  • "Rawls's Theory of Justice" by Arne Hallam, 2009 [pdf]
  • "John Rawls: Theorist of modern liberalism", by Jerome Foss, 2014 Heritage foundation [online]
  • Rawls entry at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • "John Rawls" and "Original Position" at Stanford Encyc of Philosophy
  • Rawls page at Philosophers.co.uk
  • Rawls entry at Britannica
  • Wikipedia

 

 
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