John Rawls (1921-2002), known as the world's greatest political philosopher in the 20th century, has taught at Princeton University, Cornell University, MIT and Harvard University in the United States, and has served as the director of American politics and society. President of the Society of Philosophers and President of the Eastern Region of the American Philosophical Association, and awarded the 1999 National Medal of the Humanities. After his first book, A Theory of Justice, was published in 1971, it became a must-read for students majoring in philosophy and political science. It is said that the Western scholars at that time had a volume, and Rawls' name was mentioned in almost all political philosophy works. The book has been translated into 27 languages and sold more than 400,000 copies. Today, the man has passed away, but the thin figure still stands tall in the hall of political philosophy, making people look up. His kind and shy smile still warms the hearts of all admirers.
Childhood planted the seeds of justice
On February 21, 1921, Rawls was born into a wealthy intellectual family in Baltimore. His father, William Lee, was a prominent self-taught lawyer and constitutional expert, and a close friend and informal advisor to then-Maryland Governor Albert Ritchie. Her mother, Anna Abel, was president of the Baltimore branch of the League of Women Voters. Rawls was greatly influenced by his mother, and her work for women's rights drew Rawls's later attention to women's equal rights.
Although he was well-off, he suffered two tragedies in his childhood. For two years in a row his two younger brothers died after contracting diseases from him - diphtheria and pneumonia, respectively. The sad memory pierced his heart deeply. Rawls later mentioned that it was these misfortunes that further aggravated his stuttering and plagued him throughout his life. The successive deaths of two younger brothers made the young Rawls feel the ruthlessness of fate, and also made him have a special concern for the disadvantaged. He also began to look to the black people around him and befriended a black child, but this was opposed by his mother. My father was as racially prejudiced as anyone of his class. Issues of race and class entered his mind again. While on vacation with his family in Maine, he discovered that poor white people in the area had far less educational opportunities and life prospects. Years later, he wrote in "The Theory of Justice" that social institutions determine people's different social status and different life prospects. This is a particularly profound inequality that requires the principles of justice to regulate. Childhood experiences seem to have destined his mission in this life. Surviving the Second World War When World War II
broke out, Rawls attended Princeton University.
After experimenting with chemistry, mathematics and even art history, he finally chose philosophy and met Malcolm, the most important teacher of his college days. The two's initial meeting in the summer of 1941 ended with Rawls's submission being severely criticized and rejected, but it instead reinforced his interest in philosophy. In January 1943, the intelligent and hard-working Rawls graduated from the philosophy department with the best grades a semester early. A month later he received military training and became an infantryman in the Pacific theater, serving successively in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan, and spent two unhappy military careers in his life. During this time, he was almost ambushed by the Japanese, but the goddess of luck came again, because the Japanese guns fired too early, and Rawls survived. He expressed deep condemnation for the US dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This righteous young man asked this question: Why is there evil in the world? Can human beings be redeemed? Is it possible to build a just and well-ordered society? The war sparked his thinking on the issue of human justice, and he tried to find the profound causes and solutions behind man-made disasters. His life's work has been to discover what justice demands of us, and to show that we humans are capable of achieving it.
In early 1946, Rawls left the military's "gloomy place" by giving up his chance to become an officer, and was able to return to Princeton to pursue a master's degree in philosophy. There he met Madi, a fourth-year girl at Brown University. Six months later, the two married in June 1949. Since then, Rawls has had a 53-year gentle companion. In 1950, Rawls was a double happiness. He received a doctorate in philosophy and welcomed his first child, Anna. In a seminar in Princeton during the 1949-1950 school year, Rawls studied almost all the important views on justice in American history, and tried to integrate each view into a systematic conception of justice
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middle. From 1950 to 1952, Rawls was a lecturer in the philosophy department. At Princeton, he met many mentors and friends. Thanks to them, Rawls was freed from the entanglement of metaphysical controversies and devoted himself to constructive philosophical tasks. The 1951 Outline of a Deterministic Procedure for Ethics was an early attempt to address the central question in Rawls's mature theory: what deci- sion procedures help us resolve controversial issues impartially. Since then he has been devoted to the research and writing of "Theory of Justice".
From 1952 to 1953, he traveled as a senior visiting scholar at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he was greatly inspired by his substantial work on law and political philosophy, especially under the influence of Hart and Berlin. His later scholarly goal: to find a way to unite liberty and equality in a concept of political justice.
At the time he wrote A Theory of Justice, America was in chaos, with the Vietnam War on the outside and the black movement, student protests, and feminist movements on the inside. Rawls attributed the crux of various social crises to the severe uneven distribution of wealth, and placed the solution of justice issues on the rational design of the social system, hoping to build a well-ordered society so that people could obtain a valuable good life.
In 1962 he came to Harvard to teach. Rawls came to Stanford during the 1969-1970 school year with a 200-page third draft of A Theory of Justice in order to concentrate on his magnum opus. At that time there was no condition for writing with a computer, and the revised part was printed out by the secretary. At 6 o'clock one morning, the director of the research center called him: "A few incendiary bombs exploded in the center at night! All your stuff is gone!" Rawls's heart suddenly plummeted, and all his writing manuscripts for the past 8 months All on desks in the office. But to his delight, his manuscript survived the fire, but was baptized by water.
In September 1970, Rawls returned to Harvard, where he had to spend evenings putting the finishing touches on the manuscript due to both administrative and teaching duties. He didn't know the length of the manuscript himself, and was taken aback when Harvard Press sent him a 587-page proof to proofread. At the end of 1971, when this epoch-making masterpiece with nearly 20 years of hard work was published, it shocked the United States and the world, and Rawls was recognized as a leading figure in political philosophy. A Theory of Justice aroused renewed attention to substantive issues in moral and political philosophy, and realized the turn of political philosophy toward justice. Numerous scholars soon found that they had to carry out research within Rawls' theoretical framework from now on. Rawls' influence on the West involves fields such as philosophy, law, psychology, political science, and economics. He also set a model for later generations to dedicate his entire academic career to the tireless study of an intellectual problem. After the publication of "Theory of Justice", he published "Political Liberalism" (1993), "Law of Peoples" (1999) and other books as further explanation and improvement of his theory of justice. His life is clearly presented in his collections of essays, and these masterpieces bear witness to the 48 years of his painstaking efforts.
two principles of justice
Rawls takes the basic structure of society as the theme of justice, and takes utilitarianism as his main theoretical opponent. He treats the choice of the principles of justice as a process of contract making. The first part of The Theory of Justice devised a primordial state in which people know only the general affairs of human society, but are behind a veil of ignorance and know nothing about any personal information. He asked: If we did not know our talents, wealth, or ideas, what principles of justice would we choose? His answer is the Two Principles of Justice. The first principle is the basic principle of equal liberty, which requires the equal distribution of basic rights and duties, and corresponds to the principle of liberty. The second principle includes the principle of fairness and equality of opportunity and the principle of difference, which correspond to the principles of equality and fraternity, respectively. The difference principle asserts that social and economic inequalities benefit those who benefit the least. Among them, the first principle takes precedence over the second principle, and in the second principle, the opportunity principle takes precedence over the difference principle, indicating that in terms of priority, Rawls believes that freedom takes precedence over equality, and justice takes precedence over efficiency and welfare. The two principles emphasize two different aspects of the social system. The first principle is about the political rights of citizens, and the second principle is about social and economic interests. He declared that society must pay more attention to those less gifted and born into less favorable social positions. Rawls uses the original position and the social contract theory to demonstrate why people choose these two principles. Another way to prove it is through the "balance of reflection", that is, the two principles are reflected and contrasted with common sense justice judgments to achieve the balance and consistency of the two. Rawls firmly believes that his principles of justice are practical and feasible, and for this reason, he discusses the institutional requirements of justice in the second part of The Theory of Justice, and the third part demonstrates the stability of the theory of justice. He firmly believes that his ideal of justice is by no means utopia.
The concept of justice is not only the theme of Rawls's life research, but also the creed of his life. When his new wife told him that her patriarchal parents only paid for her brother's college education and that she and her sister had no such honor, he decided to give his children the same opportunity. Later, his 4 children finished university with his support.
After the outbreak of the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense decided not to recruit students with excellent academic performance, and students who failed in one subject may be drafted into the army, which also gave special powers to professors. Rawls argues that it is unfair to treat students in this way. Those students from wealthy and well-connected families deserve the same fate as everyone else. He joined forces with his colleagues to advise schools at school meetings to adopt their advice.
In the eyes of his colleagues and students, he was a quiet, modest, elegant and gentleman. He was so perfect that some jokingly called him "Christ." He does not seek fame or fortune, nor does he wish to be in the spotlight, and apart from enjoying relaxing time with family and friends, he dedicates his life to research and teaching. In 1999 he finally agreed to accept the National Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, after which he routinely declined honors. Her daughter Liz said he would do more than have dinner with the prime minister. He has often accused the British royal family of practices and privileged corrupt influences. This also explains why he likes Lincoln - he thinks Lincoln is a president who values equality and never compromises with evil. In his Harvard office also hangs a portrait of Lincoln by his confidant wife, Maddie. He has always given support and attention to the artistic activities that his wife loves. On the cover of the Cambridge Handbook introducing him is a portrait of him painted by his wife. At one point he refused to publish any pictures of himself, wondering why people would care about his looks.
Rawls' teaching career at Harvard lasted until 1991. He devotes a lot of energy to classroom teaching, and his speeches are always meticulously prepared, written and revised again and again. He distributed the lecture notes to the students, so as not to affect their understanding because of his sometimes stuttering. Although sometimes stuttering makes it difficult for him to say a word completely, and he can understand the learning content through the lecture without listening, but every time he takes a class, the lecture hall with hundreds of people is always crowded, and he has to go early to get a seat . After the class, the devout students will send him away with a red palm, until he can't hear it. Among his students were dozens of high-profile philosophers, many of them women, and he had at least one student in most important philosophy departments at American universities. Rawls himself likes to study the great philosophers of history - Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc., with great respect for them, and has been thinking about what he can learn from them. A mentor and friend to countless graduate students, he has guided many to become influential interpreters of these philosophers.
With deep blue eyes, he was also an excellent sailor, and he craved oatmeal cakes like a child when he drank tea. He is full of love for life. Still exercising in his seventies, he liked cycling, jogging and hiking, and in the days before his death he still went out for a daily walk, just like his beloved philosopher Kant, who outlived Kant by a year. At 9:30 a.m. on November 24, 2002, the 81-year-old man with a heart like a child died peacefully at home due to heart failure, and remained awake until the last moment.
Before his death, he exhausted his last efforts to organize and publish "Justice as Fairness - A New Theory of Justice", which succinctly summarizes many aspects of his justice thought, and seems to make the world remember his entrustment. Today, the world that has lost Rawls still echoes his question: "If there is no justice, what is the value of human existence in this world?"
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