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Topic: John Rawls


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In the News (Mon 23 Nov 09)

  
  Guardian Unlimited | Obituaries | Obituary: John Rawls
Rawls contended that with the banishment of this sort of bias-inducing knowledge, the participants in the original position are forced, even if self-centred, into the moral point of view - or, as he called it in the last rousing chapters of A Theory Of Justice, "the perspective of eternity".
Rawls, moreover, always insisted that the abstract principles in which political philosophers dealt had to be tested against pre-theoretical convictions of "common sense" - he suggested that political philosophers had to learn to adjust first principles and moral intuitions until they cohered in what he termed, in another famous phrase, "reflective equilibrium".
Rawls was born, the second of five brothers, to an old and wealthy Baltimore family, and acquired, early on, almost Puritan good manners and moral earnestness.
www.guardian.co.uk /obituaries/story/0,3604,848488,00.html   (2370 words)

  
 Prospect - Selected Features - Portrait: John Rawls   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Rawls believes, contentiously, that if we were participants in the original position, we would pursue a low-risk strategy and agree to principles which are basically egalitarian--principles which guarantee the highest possible minimum levels of freedom, wealth and opportunity, even at the cost of lowering average levels.
Rawls suggests that we would elect to be governed by two principles (his famous "two principles of justice"), the first concerning liberty, the second the distribution of wealth and power.
Rawls came to believe that while his society was meant to permit a great diversity of value systems, the argument he advanced for it would only ever appeal to those who accepted one set of values--those of secular liberalism.
members.aol.com /menick/rawls.html   (4911 words)

  
 The politics of John Rawls.
Rawls later work claims that his concerns are not metaphysical, but political: a stable and workable society in the western liberal tradition.
John Rawls makes both claims: he opens A Theory of Justice with the assumption that society is necessary, and goes on to describe conditions inside society which he claims are 'just'.
Rawls suggests that acceptance of the liberal conception of justice might evolve, from acquiescence in a 'modus vivendi', to a genuine overlapping consensus.
web.inter.nl.net /users/Paul.Treanor/rawls.html   (13506 words)

  
 Rawls, John [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Rawls explains in the Preface to the first edition of TJ that one of the book’s main aims is to provide a “workable and systematic moral conception to oppose” utilitarianism.
About their society, Rawls has the parties simply assume that it is characterized by the “circumstances of justice,” which principally include (a) the fact that material goods are scarce, but moderately so and (b) that there is, within society, a plurality of worldviews—“conceptions of the good” —moral, religious, and secular.
Rawls has the parties to the OP assume that the society for which they are choosing principles is in the “circumstances of justice,” which include the presence of a plurality of irreconcilable moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines.
www.iep.utm.edu /r/rawls.htm   (10100 words)

  
 John Rawls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Borden (Bordley) Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland on February 21, 1921.
Rawls, to the amazement of many, refuted this application and claimed that nations were self-sufficient, unlike the cooperative enterprises that domestic societies are.
Rawls claimed that natural resources do not determine a country's wealth, but that it is determined by human capital and the political culture of a country.
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/John_Rawls   (2561 words)

  
 John Rawls Biography   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
John Rawls (February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was a Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples.
John Borden (Bordley) Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland.
Rawls argued that the representative parties in the original position would select justice as fairness, including the liberty principle and the difference principle, to govern the basic structure of society.
www.biographybase.com /biography/Rawls_John.html   (1387 words)

  
 John Rawls Biography | Encyclopedia of World Biography
John Rawls, son of William Lee Rawls and Anna Abel Stump, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 21, 1921.
Rawls held that justice is the first virtue of social institutions and that the good of the whole society cannot override the inviolability that each person has founded on justice.
Rawls depicted the original position as one in which persons are ignorant of social status, differences in ability, fortunes, and even intelligence.
www.bookrags.com /biography/john-rawls   (1080 words)

  
 RAWLS: THE ORIGINAL POSITION
Rawls doesn't suppose that the members of this group are in any degree concerned for the happiness of mankind, or for one another's happiness.
In later expositions of the theory Rawls avoids saying that these people are selfish, he says that they have their own purposes (selfish or not), and that each is trying to do the best for his or her purposes without being concerned for the purposes of others.
Rawls says that these are 'the circumstances of justice', the circumstances to which rules of justice are relevant.
www.humanities.mq.edu.au /Ockham/y64l13.html   (3851 words)

  
 The Chronicle: 7/20/2001: The Enduring Significance of John Rawls
John Rawls, who turned 80 this year, is the most distinguished moral and political philosopher of our age.
Rawls had been working on the book for more than 20 years and had published a group of influential articles that had already made his main ideas familiar to philosophers, but the publication of the book had a dramatic impact.
Rawls recognizes that kind of problem, but suggests that it be left for a later stage of political choice, after basic principles are chosen.
chronicle.com /free/v47/i45/45b00701.htm   (3029 words)

  
 Rawls' Mature Theory of Social Justice: A Introduction for Students
John Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most important political philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Rawls' theory provides a framework that explains the significance, in a society assumed to consist of free and equal persons, of political and personal liberties, of equal opportunity, and cooperative arrangements that benefit the more and the less advantaged members of society.
Rawls does include among the basic liberties of the person "the right to hold and to have the exclusive use of personal property." This is because this liberty is the basis for a sense of personal independence and self-respect.
www.wku.edu /~jan.garrett/ethics/matrawls.htm   (3990 words)

  
 John Rawls -- Philosophy Books and Online Resources
Rawls’ political philosophy is a continuation of the idea of the Social Contract.
Harvard University professor John Rawls destroyed the notion that political philosophy was dead and revived the discussion among intellectuals about the nature of justice.
Rawls was opposed to the utilitarian position of justice, believing that it was not just the outcome of pure utility, and was also opposed a purely intuitive view of ethics, which states that people have some source of knowledge or intuition that explains moral judgments and the right way of life.
www.erraticimpact.com /~20thcentury/html/john_rawls.htm   (1111 words)

  
 PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "John Rawls"
Rawls calls this theory justice as fairness and fairness means, right, what is agreeable to you if we temporarily imagined ourselves ignorant of these facts about our own talents and status.
Because Rawls thought that when private citizens went to vote, they were failing at democratic citizenship for example, if they voted for a candidate because that candidate held a certain religious view, which led them to take a certain view about abortion, for example.
That is, before Rawls, our conception of justice not only in the academy but I think also in policymaking was just a very crude style of cost benefit analysis, right, where we just tried to maximize something that we felt was good and minimize something that we thought was bad.
www.pbs.org /thinktank/transcript1158.html   (3613 words)

  
 John Rawls A Theory of Justice Refuted
Rawls is a hypocrite because he does not believe that people will agree to fair rules in the real world.
Rawls’ original position by focusing only on distribution and imposing a veil of ignorance so merit and rights are ignored is a try at a Hobson's choice for socialism but is in fact unfair, evil, and criminal because by force it creates rules that ignore property rights, i.e.
Rawls’ "contribution" to philosophy was to con people with a process that generates criminally unfair rules and declare that they were "fair" rules because and only because they resulted from an impossible process.
members.tripod.com /~wwx2/RawlsRft.htm   (1676 words)

  
 Ever since the publication of A Theory of Justice, John Rawls has been modifying his conception of justice as fairness. ...
What Rawls came to realize is that the failure of Theory was that it did not distinguish between two very different kinds of moral conceptions: that of a comprehensive moral theory which addressed the problem of justice, and that of a political conception of justice that was independent of any comprehensive theory.
Rawls must go one step further and show that his political conception would be preferred by reasonable persons over any other political conception.
Rawls sees that one objection to his theory is that it appears to be a consensus based on self-interest rather than on the principles of justice.
caae.phil.cmu.edu /Cavalier/Forum/meta/background/Rawls_pl.html   (1722 words)

  
 Harvard Gazette: John Rawls, influential political philosopher, dead at 81
John Rawls, the James Bryant Conant University Professor Emeritus, whose 1971 book, "A Theory of Justice" argued persuasively for a society based on equality and individual rights, died Nov. 24 at the age of 81.
Rawls is considered by many to be the most important political philosopher of the 20th century and a powerful advocate of the liberal perspective.
Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law at Harvard, said of Rawls, "He was the dominant figure in political and moral philosophy in the second half of the 20th century.
www.news.harvard.edu /gazette/2002/12.05/03-rawls.html   (857 words)

  
 A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
Rawls explicitly addresses the fact that there will be situations where these two primary principles will be in conflict with each other.
Rawls adopts the concept of efficiency that is associated with the name Pareto in the field of economics.
Rawls claims that rational people will unanimously adopt his principles of justice if their reasoning is based on general considerations, without knowing anything about their own personal situation.
oak.cats.ohiou.edu /~piccard/entropy/rawls.html   (1342 words)

  
 Original Position (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
As Rawls pointed out, the idea of an initial situation of choice for ethico-political principles is common to other approaches, and represents a hypotheticalization of familiar reasoning within the social contract tradition.
Rawls explicitly identified two sorts of considerations that are relevant to such analysis and implies a third.
Secondly, Rawls noted that, in order to determine what sort of principles might be fit to play a certain role, we must understand what (formal) constraints on such principles are reasonable to impose, at least tentatively, as an expression of the function which we expect such principles to discharge.
plato.stanford.edu /entries/original-position   (3620 words)

  
 EpistemeLinks: Website results for philosopher John Rawls
Rawls was a contemporary social contract theorist at Harvard University and arguably the most important political philosopher of the 20th century.
In his best known work, A Theory of Justice, Rawls' guiding idea is that in a just society the laws and institutions would not confer advantages on some people at the expense of others based on natural and social contingencies that are arbitrary from a moral standpoint.
Rawls argues that we would put priority, first, on providing equal liberties and fair opportunities for all and, second, on maximizing the share of income and wealth of those least advantaged.
www.epistemelinks.com /Main/Philosophers.aspx?PhilCode=Rawl   (368 words)

  
 John Rawls
Rawls' theory is considered a liberal theory, meaning primarily that he is in favour of a society which is designed to help out the less fortunate individuals.
Rawls uses the original position not to justify the authority of some particular government, but rather to try to figure out what basic principles should govern any society when it is set up.
Rawls suggests a super-simple way to understand the original position: two persons have a piece of cake to share between them by cutting it into two pieces.
infotech.fanshawec.on.ca /faculty/jedicke/rawls.htm   (1184 words)

  
 Amazon.com: Political Liberalism: Books: John Rawls   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Now, Rawls has revised his previous conception of society: it is not necessary that a society is relatively homogeneous in the moral beliefs of its elements; it is sufficient that the political institutions are suitable to accomodate every line of thought that is not against the "overlapping consensus" of society.
Rawls argues that ever since Catholicism and Protestantism fought each other to a standstill in Renaissance Europe, and the separation of Church and State was accepted as unavoidable, "reasonable pluralism" has become a fact of life for modern societies, and a fact which should be welcomed.
Rawls regards the relations of production as a secondary question which can be sorted out in due course, once the institutions of representative democracy and the judiciary have been settled and the citizens can legislate the social system.
www.amazon.com /Political-Liberalism-John-Rawls/dp/0231052499   (1739 words)

  
 Policy Library ¦  John Rawls Resource Page
John Rawls died on Sunday November 24 2002 at the age of 81.
Rawls is considered by many to be the most important political philosopher of the second half of the 20th century and a powerful advocate of the liberal perspective.
An essay on Rawls' Contractarianism in A Theory of Justice.
www.policylibrary.com /rawls   (783 words)

  
 John Rawls
John Rawls (February 21, 1921-November 24, 2002) was a Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University and author of A Theory of Justice (1971), Political Liberalism, and The Law of Peoples.
After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950, Rawls decided to teach there until 1952 when he received a Fullbright Fellowship to Oxford University (Christ Church), where he was influenced by the liberal political theorist and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin.
Rawls isn'ted for his contributions to Liberal political philosophy, in particular its ethical foundations.
www.wordlookup.net /jo/john-rawls.html   (753 words)

  
 Rawls on Justice
But Rawls has gone beyond his views of 1971, and philosophy courses are beginning to take his important later thinking into account.
Rawls' approach is not Utilitarian and it does not rely heavily on arguments from tradition.
Because of the fairness of the procedure Rawls has described, he says, the principles that would be chosen by means of this procedure would be fair principles.
www.wku.edu /~jan.garrett/ethics/johnrawl.htm   (1299 words)

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