Morality

• John Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."^[1] His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism,^[2] takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."^[1] Rawls employs a number of thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice.^[1] He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy.

Major ideas

• Justice as Fairness, which consists of the liberty principle, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle.
• The original position
• Reflective equilibrium
• Overlapping consensus
• Public reason