John Rawls
American political philosopher
John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American philosopher who worked in moral and political philosophy. He wrote A Theory of Justice, which set out his idea of justice as fairness.
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American Born 1921 in Baltimore, United States Died 2002
About John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was born in Baltimore in 1921 and died in 2002. He was an American thinker whose work centered on moral, legal and political philosophy, and he held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard. In A Theory of Justice (1971), he argued for what he called justice as fairness: equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and arrangements that give the greatest benefit to the least advantaged whenever inequalities arise. To support this, he used a thought experiment known as the original position, in which people choose the kind of society they would live in without knowing their own place in it. In a later book, Political Liberalism (1993), he asked how political power can be used legitimately in a society whose citizens hold many different moral, religious and philosophical views. Rawls was awarded the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy in 1999, and the National Humanities Medal in the same year, which President Bill Clinton presented to him.