Knowra John Rawls John Rawls John Rawls (1921–2002) was an American political philosopher whose theory of justice as fairness shaped modern debates about equality, liberty, and political legitimacy.
Justice as Fairness : John Rawls’s political conception of justice, which treats principles chosen under fair conditions as standards for society’s basic structure. This is the name Rawls gave to his central theory of justice.
Rawls's Two Principles of Justice : Rawls’s principles securing equal basic liberties and regulating social and economic inequalities. They are the outcome the original position is designed to select.
Social Contract : A family of theories that explain political authority or principles of justice through agreement among people. Rawls revives contract reasoning as a device for identifying fair principles, not as a historical event.
Robert Nozick : An American philosopher who defended individual rights and entitlement theory against patterned distributive principles. Nozick argues that Rawlsian redistribution violates rights to holdings acquired justly.
Political Philosophy : The study of political authority, justice, rights, institutions, and the grounds of collective rule. Rawls’s work helped renew this field’s analytic debate about justice and institutions.
Original Position : A hypothetical choice situation in which representatives select principles of justice without knowing their social positions. It models the fair standpoint from which Rawls derives principles of justice.
Equal Basic Liberties : A scheme of fundamental liberties, including political participation, conscience, expression, and personal freedom, secured equally for all. Rawls’s first principle gives these liberties priority over gains in wealth or welfare.
Immanuel Kant : An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose ethics grounds moral requirements in rational agency and universal principles. Rawls drew on Kantian ideas of autonomy and principles that apply to everyone.
Libertarianism : A political philosophy that gives strong priority to individual liberty, property rights, and limits on state power. Its emphasis on holdings and voluntary transfer conflicts with Rawls’s distributive requirements.
Egalitarianism : A family of views holding that people should have equal status or that inequalities require justification. Rawls’s principles make equality central while allowing only tightly constrained inequalities.
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