John Rawls

John Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a lawyer. As a child he lost two younger brothers to illnesses they had caught from him. He studied at Princeton University and served as an infantryman in the Pacific during the Second World War, then returned to Princeton for a doctorate in philosophy. After teaching at Princeton, Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined Harvard University in 1962 and taught there for most of his career. His book A Theory of Justice (1971) asks what principles of justice people would choose if they did not know what place they would hold in society, a thought experiment he called the 'veil of ignorance'. He argued that they would choose equal basic liberties for all and would accept social and economic inequalities only if they benefited the least advantaged. The book revived political philosophy in the English-speaking world. His later works include Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples. He received the National Humanities Medal in 1999. He died in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 2002.

John Rawls is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: As a college student he wrote an intensely religious thesis and considered studying for the priesthood. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy