John Rawls (b. 1921), a Harvard professor of philosophy, is without doubt one of the very few creative and influential writers of political theory in the contemporary West. His most important work, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, was a major attack on the prevailing utilitarianism of theories of political obligation and social order, and constituted a brilliant attempt to revivify the social contract approach to political and social theory. His work started a rethinking of accepted positions in many related subjects, especially jurisprudence, where legal philosophers have followed him in attacking the positive law theories which were the legal counterpart of utilitarianism. The essential points of Rawls’ work are twofold. He wants to re-establish the preeminence of natural rights arguments, so that there will be some values we hold as absolute, principally the right to liberty, and secondly, but only secondly, a right to equality. He also wishes to change the methodology from the sort of cost-accounting approach held dear by utilitarians, to a more absolute form of argument.
In pursuit of the latter he relies heavily on what he calls the ‘justice as fairness’ argument. One technique for making these points is the ‘veil of ignorance’. Essentially this calls on us to try to pretend that we do not know certain basic social facts about ourselves. Thus we are to imagine a person who is ignorant of his sex, age, class or period of history. What social institutions would such a person think were fair? The point is that if you do not know whether you are to be a slave or ruler, man or woman, living in the 10th or 20th century, you could not opt for ‘unfair’rules, lest you ended up on the wrong side of the bargain. Once stated, it is a very simple test of whether an institution is ‘fair’ or not, but no one before Rawls had thought of this way of modernizing the traditional social contract methodology. Rawls has reinstated a particular form of liberal political theory and, whether it lasts or not, he is one of the very few creative and original contemporary thinkers in the field.
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