Abstract

With his claim that a society in which those with resources assist those in need is not merely moral but also rational, John Rawls revitalised the fields of political and ethical philosophy. It was his idea to apply the positivist method to moral and political issues. This interpretation is new; in fact, it is more commonly believed that he broke with positivism, restored the social contract and Kantian traditions, or brought rational choice to ethics. These more widely accepted interpretations are partially based on Rawls’ own self-descriptions as a Kantian, a social contract theorist, and a rational choice theorist. The scope of the argument and its support have been shaped by considerations of justice, social practices, moral psychology, the consequences of morality, and the nature of philosophy in ethics. He took a positivist approach to philosophy, even though the social contract traditions were now used to reframe this positivism. Rawls’ magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice,” has integrated all these subjects. But this book’s guiding philosophical conception was predictably anti-foundational. This research paper focuses only on the first section of the book because it has the essential premise of his argument. It is that the positivist expectation that all reasonable people will reach the same conclusion in their assessments and because it is this premise that explains the contradictions in his opinions and, so, the way his ideas developed later. Although various scholarly commentators have concurred with Rawls, their interpretations of how the principles of justice originated from and applied to everyone have significantly varied.

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