John Rawls (1021-2002) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. [1] His father was a lawyer, and his mother was active in politics. He served in World War II, leaving the Christian faith in the face of unfair and needless slaughter on the battlefield. He studied at Princeton, Cornell, and Oxford Universities. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Norman Malcom, and H. L. A. Hart profoundly influenced his philosophical education. He taught at Harvard for thirty years. During the Viet Nam war, he spoke out against the war and the apparent defects of a political system that could conduct it. Many people feel that Rawls was the most influential American political philosopher of the 20^th century. His book, A Theory of Justice, forms the primary basis for this blog. [2]

Political Philosophy According to Rawls

Rawls believes political philosophy plays four main roles in a society’s public culture:

1. Philosophy proposes grounds for reasoned agreement when sharp political divisions threaten to lead to violent conflict.
2. Political philosophy allows citizens to orient themselves within their social world. Philosophy can meditate on what it is to be a member of a particular society—in a democracy, an equal citizen—and offer a unifying framework for answering divisive questions about how people with that political status should relate to each other.
3. Political philosophy assists society in establishing workable political arrangements while encouraging social progress.
4. Political philosophy assists public life by providing alternatives to the cruelty, lust for domination, prejudice, folly, and corruption that often characterize public life in every society.

In the end, and importantly for this series of blogs, Political Philosophy can encourage the hope that human life is not simply domination and cruelty, prejudice, folly, and corruption, and if it is, to suggest wise and fair paths to a better future. [3] Rawls sees Political Philosophy as attempting to form a theoretical and practical wisdom that can assist society in achieving and maintaining a wise, fair, and just social order.

Contract Theory

According to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and their intellectual followers, governments were formed by essentially free (or unformed) individuals in a “State of Nature,” out of which they were free to covenant to unite and form a common government.  This consent can be either tacit, by submitting to and receiving the government’s benefits, or actual, by formal agreement to the government so formed. Locke, for example, does not think that this consent needs to be of all the members of the society but only by the majority of those forming the society. [4] Once formed, such a government is binding until properly altered.

Rawls continues the tradition of the Contract Theory and desires to outline a foundation for our political system and liberal democracy acceptable to modern people. He is to be honored for the attempt, despite my feeling that his attempt fails in fundamental ways. The best defense of Contract theory is not an abstract or theoretical foundation but a deep understanding of the historical and concrete ways it emerged. Contract theory did not spring forth from the Enlightenment without cause. It was the culmination of a long enculturation of Western Europe in which individuals in both private and public life adopted a principle of free association, which was the organic root of Contract Theory and its importance in England and America. [5]

In the beginning, covenant theology naturally found application in the notion of a “social contract,” which it did. Pilgrims, Puritans, theologians, and others found a connection between the kinds of covenants that God created with the human race in the Bible and the social covenants that human beings enter into with a lawful governing authority. If God ruled by means of covenants, then perhaps human beings should as well. It was natural, therefore, for the founders to view a “social contract” among human beings as the proper way to guide the new democracy they were founding. This foundation for their thinking was developed over a long period of Western history and only relatively recently put in the abstract formulation of political philosophers. Rawls, as a lapsed Christian but deeply impacted by Christian values, attempted in A Theory of Justice to provide a foundation for liberal democracy acceptable to modern and postmodern people.

The Original Position: Contract Theory Revisited

Whether the great philosophers who advanced the theory believed in its historicity is a matter of discussion; however, it is clear that Rawls’ formulation of the theory, which he calls “the Original Position.” is entirely hypothetical. [6] The “original position” is an imaginary situation wherein participants in a society to be formed are without information that enables them to tailor principles of justice favorable to their circumstances.  In other words, he places the human race in a fictional position in which no one knows their place in society, social status, or class, such essential times as race or gender, natural assets and abilities, level of intelligence, strength, education, and the like. [7] This is called the “Veil of Ignorance.”

The Veil of Ignorance

Rawls’ justification for this fictional situation is that it ensures that the fundamental agreements reached are “fair.” In other words, if someone knows what every human being knows, their race, family, parentage, sex, intelligence, physical attributes, social position, educational capacity, religion, etc. “fairness” could not be reached due to human prejudice. Not surprisingly, what comes of this definition is a notion of fairness that is eminently accepted among liberal elites at places like Harvard but less common elsewhere in human civilization. Unfortunately, this notion also makes a mockery of justice since it implies fairness is something that those of us who know our race, intelligence level, physical capacities, families, friendships, neighborhoods, and religious traditions cannot achieve.

I can only point out that the “original position” discounts what wise people have always known: the capacity for justice is learned over a long time through self-discipline and experience in life, by facing our prejudices and selfishness, by thinking clearly about the limitations of our family, neighborhoods, churches, synagogues, mosques and the like and trying to reach fair social arrangements despite our prejudices. Perhaps more importantly, what makes anyone think that we can ever put into practice a fairness ideal that begins by cutting itself off from everything human? The moment we leave the fantasy of the original position, we are, most unfortunately, in the real world of pride and prejudice, foolishness, knavery, greed, selfishness, and the like—the world where human societies are formed and must find their stability.

The concept of the original position has been criticized by better minds than mine, including Jurgen Habermas. [8]In Habermas’ view, Rawls’s theory is, as I have mentioned, overly abstract, placing the burden of supporting liberal democracy on the shaky foundation of a convenient fiction. First, the so-called Veil of Ignorance that the original position supposes has only a polemical value. In practice, the assumptions made are ungrounded in the human condition and society as they exist in the present and have evolved in the past. Secondly, its premise (that only in a state of ignorance would a just society be chosen) undermines democracy by assuming that the structure selected could not be put into practice any other way than by a convenient fiction. This creates a gulf between the social ideal Rawls is trying to advance and the flesh and blood moral agents required to sustain liberal democracy. As literary fiction, it works, but it does not provide a sufficient foundation for liberal democracy to function, as the condition of our democracy illustrates. Governments exist in the real world, and their legitimacy must be defended based on the nature of reality and human beings.

This leads to the most serious failure of Rawls’ Original Position and Veil of Ignorance, a feature distinguishing Rawls from the original contract theorists. Hume, Locke, and the other proponents of contract theory spoke of “a state of nature,” while Rawls can only talk of an admittedly illusory original position. The originators of contract theory felt that they had discerned a feature of nature and human nature in propounding their theory. They did not necessarily agree on the proper description of that nature, but they were committed to a form of natural law. In other words, they thought their approach was ontologically grounded in the world and human nature. Human beings, they thought, had been created in such a way that they ought to be free, and democracy was. Therefore, a part of the direction nature was taking the human race.

Rawls’ theory is “ideological” in the sense of that term that realists, like Napoleon, felt objectionable—it is a mere idea cut off from reality, a figment of human imagination, not a feature of reality, not even a theoretical explanation of reality identified through investigation and study. Karl Popper’s critique against Hegel equally applies to Rawls: His theory is a kind of idealized historical prophecy. He uses a non-existent convenient fiction, rather than hard facts and historical study, to ground his theory. Had Rawls done so, he might have found that there is another, more realistic ground for liberal democracy—the commitment of fallen, fallible, finite creatures to seek the character and capacity to sustain a free society in the face of the prejudice of others and even their self-centeredness and brokenness.

Failure of Contract Theories and a More Realistic Approach

Suffice it to say that, in my view, Rawls’ front-end loads his conclusions in his statement of the original position and his subsequent outline of what “reasonable people” would do in such a situation. In so doing, he violates one of the primary principles of this series of blogs: any social theory should be pragmatically based upon human society as it evolved, not based on hypothetical “original positions” or social contracts. The human community never developed in the way the various Contract Theories postulate.

The freedoms of liberal democracy were won over an incredible length of time, at least from the Greek democracies through the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution. They were defeated by frail, prejudiced, self-interested human beings as they sought to construct a society where they could experience political freedom and self-determination.  The liberal democracy Rawls defends does not rely upon an Original Position or a pre-historical Social Contract. It depends upon a society of people willing to solve their problems, personal and social, and self-critical enough to make reasoned decisions to overcome prejudice and self-centeredness.  The notion of an “original position” prevents serious reflection on how liberal democracy evolved and its fragility. Freedom cannot be assumed. It must be won.

Copyright 2023, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] This initial section is taken from “John Rawls” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy found at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#LifWor (downloaded May 11, 2023).

[2] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971-1999).

[3] Id.

[4] For example, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government Revised Critical Ed. (New York, NY: Mentor Press/Cambridge Press, 1960, 1963), at 376.

[5] Andrew C. McLaughlin, Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Greenwich CN: Fawcett Press, 1961), 28,

[6] Rawls, at 11 & 104.

[7] See, “Original Position” in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/#:~:text=Rawls’s%20original%20position%20is%20an,favorable%20to%20their%20personal%20circumstances. Downloaded May 11, 2023).

[8] Jurgen Habermas, “Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls Poltical Liberalism” Vol 92 Journal of PhilosophyNo. 3 (March 1995).