John Rawls 1921 - 2002

John Rawls 1921 - 2002In the late 1930s, an anxious teenager sits in a boarding school in Connecticut, surrounded by the trappings of privilege he doesn’t quite know what to do with. The school is Kent, Episcopalian and elite, a feeder into the American establishment. The boy’s days are filled with chapel services, Latin, math, sports, and the casual assumption that people like him will one day help run things. He is shy, serious, and introspective. The world outside his campus is sliding toward catastrophe — the rise of fascism, economic turmoil, the approach of war — but inside the routines of American upper-class life continue. The boy’s name is John Bordley Rawls, and he will spend the second half of the twentieth century trying to answer one basic question: what does a just society look like, if we take seriously the fact that no one really deserves the starting position they’re born into?Rawls was born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, into a professional, comfortable family. His father was a prominent lawyer; his mother was active in civic and women’s organizations. There were five Rawls boys, and for a time the household must have felt full of energy and promise. Then, in quick succession, tragedy struck: when John was still a child, two of his younger brothers died from illnesses they contracted, probably from him. One died of pneumonia after catching diphtheria; another of an infection after catching measles. It is hard to overstate how scarring this would be for a child: to see brothers die from diseases that passed through your own body. Rawls rarely spoke about this later, but friends and biographers have seen in it a source of the deep sensitivity to guilt, chance, and undeserved misfortune that runs underneath his philosophy.Selenius Media