John Rawls

[Ripheus27]

"Who is John Rawls?"
The light was fading, and Ethan Willikers could not distinguish the philosopher's face. The philosopher had asked the question simply, without expression. But from the sunset at the far end of the classroom, opalescent glints caught his eyes, and those eyes looked straight into Ethan, mordant and still--as if the question were addressed to the amorphous disquiet within him.
​

But seriously, how many people here know of John Rawls? By all accounts, he was almost a revolutionary (I say "almost" because his effect on philosophy was not quite so earth-shattering as "revolutionary" would tend to connote) ethicist and political theorist. Yet I don't think I tend to see his arguments, or even his style of (moral) argument, cited on, say, this message board, or on any other message board I can recollect membership of (except, perhaps, ephilosopher.com's back in the day). Who of those reading this post would think to invoke "reflective equilibrium" or "the original position" or "telishment" or some other Rawlsian notion in the course of debating for or against this or that moral position?

Or consider this. It was so obvious by 1971 that the American crusade in Vietnam was an extraordinary atrocity that Rawls plainly indicates the conscientious-objection movement in A Theory of Justice (and, as his biography on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, he'd already taken a stand contrary to the American war). It speaks volumes, then, to the unreason of the United States that it remains a viable point of view in this country that that war was somehow good for us to fight.

I say this even if the reason Rawls' antiwar attitude is not regularly elicited nowadays is because Rawls is not well-known. Why would he not be well-known? Isn't talking about right and wrong without talking to some degree about Rawls rather like discussing physics and failing to refer to the contributions to the field made by Edward Witten?

Or am I just mistaken and Rawls is widely remembered?

 

[Paradoxum]

Most normal people don't seem to know him, but you are right that he was a major figure.

I quite like Rawls' Theory of Justice. Is he an ethicist as well as a political philosopher though?

 

[Ripheus27]

Most normal people don't seem to know him, but you are right that he was a major figure.

I quite like Rawls' Theory of Justice. Is he an ethicist as well as a political philosopher though?

Few have done such a good job rehabilitating(sp.?) Immanuel Kant as Rawls did, wherefore in Lectures on the History of Ethical Philosophy (I think was the name of the publication) Rawls did the best that can be as such done (aside from R. Hare's adaptation of Kant to utilitarianism). I guess to this extent Rawls counts as much as an ethical as a political philosopher, but I may very well be wrong (to be honest, I'm not too clear on the division between ethics and politics).

EDIT: Also, I would expect that people in Europe would be more likely to know of Rawls than the average American. I love my country, but my love is like that of a lover who is pained by the terrible faults of his or her beloved. In my eyes, what the US did in the "Vietnam War" was, aside from the numbers, every bit as bad as the Nazi death camps. I mean, we knowingly helped Pakistan murder millions of people in 1971, for God's sake. That's 1994 Rwanda-level murdering, i.e. 10,000 #$^!ing human beings a day, that my government assisted, knowingly, in the perpetration of. On top of complicity with Indonesia's 1965-1966 butchery, and on top of the sea of toxic chemicals and napalm we flooded the countries we were "protecting" with. (I mean come the %$(& on: the USAF used almost 400,000 tons of napalm during the 60s and 70s, versus 14,000 or so during WWII. In the Pentagon Papers, it says that we were fighting Vietnam's birth rate at some point. All "Allied" nations combined dropped 2,000,000 tons of conventional ordnance on Germany and Japan, but the USAF dropped 8,000,000 on Indochina. How much more genocidal can a military get?)

2ND EDIT: Actually, to put my point in even *worse* terms, the US Army Air Force only dropped 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, whereas the US Air Force (because the Air Force and Army were separated by the time of the "Vietnam War") dropped almost 4,000,000 on South Vietnam alone (and 2,000,000 on Laos, 2,750,000 on Cambodia, and I don't know how many on North Vietnam). 160,000 tons of ordnance, including 14,000 of napalm, was sufficient to devastate 50% of Japan's cities. What the &*)# does anyone think happened to Indochina when we blitzed that region of the Earth with 50+ times as much firepower?

 

[Eudaimonist]

I'm not a fan of Rawls's Theory of Justice, or at least how it has often been used in politics (applications and misapplications of his veil of ignorance idea), but he is an interesting thinker. I haven't read the book directly, but have mainly learned about it from teachers and others commenting on the book.

I didn't know that he had written against the Vietnam war. That is interesting.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[Paradoxum]

Few have done such a good job rehabilitating(sp.?) Immanuel Kant as Rawls did, wherefore in Lectures on the History of Ethical Philosophy (I think was the name of the publication) Rawls did the best that can be as such done (aside from R. Hare's adaptation of Kant to utilitarianism). I guess to this extent Rawls counts as much as an ethical as a political philosopher, but I may very well be wrong (to be honest, I'm not too clear on the division between ethics and politics).

You're probably right.

EDIT: Also, I would expect that people in Europe would be more likely to know of Rawls than the average American. I love my country, but my love is like that of a lover who is pained by the terrible faults of his or her beloved. In my eyes, what the US did in the "Vietnam War" was, aside from the numbers, every bit as bad as the Nazi death camps. I mean, we knowingly helped Pakistan murder millions of people in 1971, for God's sake. That's 1994 Rwanda-level murdering, i.e. 10,000 #$^!ing human beings a day, that my government assisted, knowingly, in the perpetration of. On top of complicity with Indonesia's 1965-1966 butchery, and on top of the sea of toxic chemicals and napalm we flooded the countries we were "protecting" with. (I mean come the %$(& on: the USAF used almost 400,000 tons of napalm during the 60s and 70s, versus 14,000 or so during WWII. In the Pentagon Papers, it says that we were fighting Vietnam's birth rate at some point. All "Allied" nations combined dropped 2,000,000 tons of conventional ordnance on Germany and Japan, but the USAF dropped 8,000,000 on Indochina. How much more genocidal can a military get?)

2ND EDIT: Actually, to put my point in even *worse* terms, the US Army Air Force only dropped 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, whereas the US Air Force (because the Air Force and Army were separated by the time of the "Vietnam War") dropped almost 4,000,000 on South Vietnam alone (and 2,000,000 on Laos, 2,750,000 on Cambodia, and I don't know how many on North Vietnam). 160,000 tons of ordnance, including 14,000 of napalm, was sufficient to devastate 50% of Japan's cities. What the &*)# does anyone think happened to Indochina when we blitzed that region of the Earth with 50+ times as much firepower?

I don't know much about that war, but it does sound like it was a very bad idea.

 

[Ripheus27]

I'm not a fan of Rawls's Theory of Justice, or at least how it has often been used in politics (applications and misapplications of his veil of ignorance idea), but he is an interesting thinker. I haven't read the book directly, but have mainly learned about it from teachers and others commenting on the book.

I had a negative opinion about Rawls' theory before I read A Theory of Justice because I was against the idea of citing intuitions to support a philosophical argument, and it sounded to me like that was what Rawls did. I found out when I read the book that he did do such a thing, but only as a supplement to an overwhelming act of discursion on his part, wherefore my attitude towards Rawls' theory was completely transformed.

And as an avid reader for reading's sake, I also discovered that the man wrote with more lexical grace than almost everyone else I've ever engaged with through writing.

But now as to how this writing has been applied, I'm not so acquainted with anyhow aside mostly from my own invocation of Rawls in my own (so far mostly private) work. What are some of the ways you've seen the "veil of ignorance" used in political debates? Is this stuff on blogs or...?

 

[Ripheus27]

I don't know much about that war, but it does sound like it was a very bad idea.

Haha, I'd been drinking heavily while writing those edits, hence how I just kinda... exploded. I'm extremely passionate about that war, even writing a book about it (been over a decade in the making and I'm still not done, egads!), so... yeah. *Hangs head a little in shame*