People
The evils of the Inquisition and the Holocaust are not unrelated. Indeed, it seems clear that without Christian anti-semitism over many centuries--especially harsh in Russia and Eastern Europe--the Holocaust would not have happened. That Hitler's `redemptive anti-semitism' strikes us as demonic madness--how could anyone believe such fantasies--doesn't change this fact.
Yet we must not allow these great evils of the past and present to undermine our hope for the future of our society as belonging to a society of liberal and decent peoples around the world. Otherwise, the wrongful, evil, and demonic conduct of others destroys us too and seals their victory.
In 1995, Rawls suffered the first of several strokes, and he is now no longer able to work; but by a determined effort he managed by 1998 to complete the final, expanded version of his essay, "The Law of Peoples," which contains some of his strongest published expressions of feeling (such as the passage just quoted),
Encyclopedia Entries
John Rawls Oxford Companion to Philosophy John Rawls Wikipedia Original Position Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"justice as fairness" offers a non-historical or hypothetical variation on the social contract theory, in which rational agents make social decisions from behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents them from knowing in advance what status they will hold. According to Rawls, this method will produce a society where individual liberties are maximized for all citizens and social inequality is justifiable only under conditions that would be beneficial for its least-favored members. Further exposition of this theory, along with a restatement Rawls's opposition to utilitarianism and an examination of political pluralism, appear in Political Liberalism (1993) . Two Concepts of Rules (1955) is an early statement of Rawls's basic principles.
| Two Concepts of Rules | John Rawls | Ethics Updates |
| Meta-Ethics Forum: John Rawls |
Description: After brief introduction, discusses Rawls' Political Liberalism
and compares his ideas with Habermas. |
| Intellectual Biography of Rawls |
Author: Thomas Nagel |
See also
Recommended Reading: John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. by Samuel Freeman (Harvard, 2001) ; John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Harvard, 2001) ; Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics (Stanford, 1991) ; and Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls on Rawls 'A Theory of Justice', ed. by Norman Daniels (Stanford, 1989) .
"Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case." John Rawls [A Theory of Justice]