Imagine yourself in the place of an unborn child, not knowing whether you would be born a billionaire or a beggar. What sort of society would you want to be born into? Unaware of your fate, what rules and laws would you want to govern your world?
Philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) called this scenario the “veil of ignorance” in his celebrated 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Under the veil of ignorance, Rawls theorized, we would want a society that does everything it can to ensure fairness and help the most unfortunate.
In practice, Rawls used the concept of the veil of ignorance to advocate policies protecting the rights of minorities and the disadvantaged. For instance, under the veil of ignorance, it’s impossible to know whether one will be born with a physical handicap. Therefore, under Rawls’s logic, it makes sense for the government to help the disabled—for instance, by building wheelchair ramps at post offices.
A Theory of Justice was hailed upon its publication as a groundbreaking work that offered a sharp challenge to utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, articulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), holds that society should maximize the overall happiness of its citizens, even if it is at the expense of individuals. A utilitarian might argue that the cost of wheelchair ramps outweighs their benefit, since everyone would suffer by paying higher taxes to build the ramps that only a small number of people would use.
After the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was regarded as one of the leading political philosophers in the United States. His chief opponent was another Harvard professor, the conservative-leaning libertarian Robert Nozick (1938–2002), who critiqued Rawls’s work at length and argued that Rawls placed too much emphasis on the government’s role in ensuring fairness.
Still, Rawls was a hero to many, especially on the political left. He published a follow-up work, Political Liberalism (1993), that confronted many of the criticisms of his early work.
Shortly before Rawls’s death at age eighty-one, President Bill Clinton (1946–) offered him an encomium: “Almost single-handedly John Rawls revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one.”
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- A detail-oriented writer, Rawls reportedly compiled the index to A Theory of Justice by himself.
- The randomness of fate—the notion that anyone could be born poor, disabled, or a member of a minority group—forms a major theme in Rawls’s philosophy. Some commentators point to the early deaths of Rawls’s two brothers as key events in forming this view. Both brothers died from infections they had contracted from Rawls, the first from diphtheria and the other from pneumonia.
- A Theory of Justice sold more than 200,000 copies, an astonishing figure for a book of academic philosophy, and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1971.
