John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (/rɔːlz/; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. His argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberatively select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), he addresses the question of how political power can be exercised legitimately in a society where citizens hold diverse and often conflicting moral, religious, and philosophical points of view.