Bordley John Rawls (1921–2002) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, educated in philosophy at Princeton University, and served in the military in the Pacific theater during World War II. He taught at Cornell University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a professor at Harvard University where he taught philosophy for almost forty years. His theory of justice transformed twentieth-century political philosophy and has important implications for understanding the ethics of science and technology in terms of political governance and economics of the marketplace. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 24.

Major Works

Rawls's major works include A Theory of Justice (1971), The Law of Peoples (1993), Political Liberalism (1993), and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). His writings have been widely distributed and translated into more than twenty languages.

Rawls developed his thought against the background of two existing philosophies: (a) utilitarianism, which employs the principle "the...