JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Mark Bevir1 & Andrius Gališanka2

Abstract: The secondary literature on Rawls is vast, but little of it is historical. Rely-
ing on the archival materials he left to Harvard after his death, we look at the historical
contexts that informed Rawls’s understanding of political philosophy and the changes
in his thinking up to A Theory of Justice. We argue that Rawls’s classic work reveals
positivist aspirations that were altered and frayed by various encounters with post-
analytic naturalism. So, we begin in the 1940s, showing the influence of other positiv-
ist projects, such as those of Popper and Ducasse. Thereafter, we explore how Rawls’s
encounter with Wittgenstein and Quine in the 1950s and 1960s led him to introduce
the post-analytic features evident in A Theory of Justice. Our historical narrative chal-
lenges commonplace folk-understandings that portray Rawls as either wholly commit-
ted to positivism or as its principal slayer.
Keywords: John Rawls, ethics, justification, modernism, logical positivism,
logical empiricism, analytic philosophy, post-analytic philosophy, linguistic philoso-
phy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V.O. Quine.

John Rawls (1921–2002) was among the most noted political philosophers of
the twentieth century.3 The secondary literature on him is vast. Almost all of
that secondary literature seeks to elucidate, applaud, amend or reject one or
more of his arguments. Very little of it seeks to place him in his historical con-
text.4 As a result, political philosophers have only folk narratives by which to
locate Rawls in twentieth-century thought. One popular narrative has Rawls
reviving political philosophy after its alleged ‘death’ at the hands of positiv-
ism. Ironically, another popular narrative portrays Rawls as the leading figure
in a positivist and analytic movement whose narrow, technocratic approach

1 Dept of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720–1950,

USA. Email: mbevir@berkeley.edu
2 Dept of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720–1950,
USA. Email: andrius_galisanka@berkeley.edu
3 We thank the Harvard University Archives for permission to cite archived material.
4 The most notable exception is probably T. Pogge, John Rawls: His Life and Theory
of Justice, trans. M. Kosch (Oxford, 2007). More recently, the publication of Rawls’s
undergraduate thesis was accompanied by, and has inspired, studies of Rawls’s place in
the context of American theology. See the thesis and accompanying essays in J. Rawls, A
Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel (Cambridge, MA,
2009), and, for other discussions, D. Reidy, ‘Rawls’s Religion and Justice as Fairness’,
History of Political Thought, 31 (2010), pp. 309–43; and E. Gregory, ‘Before the Origi-
nal Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls’, Journal of Reli-
gious Ethics, 35 (2007), pp. 179–206.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXIII. No. 4. Winter 2012

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702 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

threatens some vision of a truer, more insightful or more open style of philoso-
phy.5
Recent studies suggest that the folk narratives about Rawls’s place in the
history of political thought might owe more to past political posturing than to
any serious historical scholarship.6 To some extent, these folk narratives
thrived because they helped to justify various positions in contemporary dis-
putes, and because the sources were not available for a properly historical
analysis. Today, however, following Rawls’s death, his papers have been
deposited in the Harvard University Archives. Our main aim is to use these
papers to provide a more informed account of Rawls’s intellectual develop-
ment and so his place in twentieth-century thought. Rawls’s papers are a
superb resource; we hope to draw attention to them and inspire further studies.
Our account of Rawls’s development is an attempt to overturn the main
folk narratives. Where one folk narrative sees Rawls as rescuing political
philosophy from positivism, we argue that his early project drew on the mod-
ernism and positivism of the Vienna Circle. Yet, where the other folk narra-
tive sees Rawls as entrenching a positivist and analytic approach to
philosophy, we argue that he later followed W.V.O. Quine and Ludwig
Wittgenstein in their naturalistic and holistic rejections of positivism that
came to characterize post-analytic philosophy. In making these arguments,
we implicitly echo many themes from the rapidly growing literature on the
history of analytic philosophy. These themes include: analysis meant differ-
ent things to different people at different times; logical empiricism was mod-
ernist and, arguably, in a sense, even anti-foundational; and ‘analytic’
philosophy flourished in America only as Quine’s holism shifted it from an
‘analytic’ to a ‘post-analytic’ stance.7
5 Other popular narratives portray Rawls as a Kantian or a social contract theorist, but
they are less pertinent to the issues of justification on which we will focus.
6 R. Adcock and M. Bevir, ‘The Remaking of Political Theory’, in Modern Political
Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880, ed. R. Adcock, M. Bevir and
S. Stimson (Princeton, 2007), pp. 209–33; P. Koikkalainen, ‘Peter Laslett and the Con-
tested Concept of Political Philosophy’, History of Political Thought, 30 (2009),
pp. 336–59.
7 For the first theme, see M. Beaney, ‘Conceptions of Analysis in Early Analytic Phi-
losophy’, Acta Analytica, 15 (2000), pp. 97–115; The Story of Analytic Philosophy,
ed. A. Biletzki and A. Matar (London, 1998); Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in
Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. J. Floyd and S. Shieh (New York, 2001). For the
second, G.C.F. Bearn, ‘The Formal Syntax of Modernism: Carnap and Le Corbusier’,
British Journal of Aesthetics, 32 (1992), pp. 227–41; H.-J. Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in
the Architecture and Philosophy of the 1920s’, in Carnap Brought Home: The View from
Vienna, ed. S. Awody and C. Klein (La Salle, 2004), pp. 357–75; P. Galison, ‘Aufbau/
Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism’, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990),
pp. 709–52; P. Galison, ‘Constructing Modernism: The Cultural Location of the
Aufbau’, in Origins of Logical Empiricism, ed. R.N. Geire and A.W. Richardson (Minne-
apolis, 1997), pp. 17–44; F. Stadler, ‘What is the Vienna Circle? Some Methodological

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 703

So, we begin by showing how, during his graduate years, Rawls formulated
a distinctively modernist project. He rejected the then dominant theories of
naturalism and intuitionism. Instead he set out to justify moral judgments in a
manner that parallelled scientific knowledge. Drawing on logical positivism,
itself an important expression of modernist thought, Rawls wanted to identify
formal principles that would explain appearances; he wanted to discover the
logical syntax of moral judgments.8 Logical positivism helps to explain sev-
eral crucial concepts of A Theory of Justice, including ‘reasonable man’, ‘con-
sidered judgments and ‘original position’. However, other equally crucial
aspects of A Theory of Justice, most notably the use of moral psychology and
holistic justification, can be explained only by reference to problems that
Rawls found with his positivism and the post-analytic positions to which he
turned to solve these problems.
Logical positivism arguably required no further justification of ethical
principles than showing that they predicted the judgments of reasonable men.
Rawls, however, thought it appropriate to also ask why reasonable men
agreed, and whether they did so for good reasons. In doing so, he moved
towards Wittgenstein’s naturalism and Quine’s holism, conceiving of ethics
as a purposeful human activity. We explore this movement in three stages.
First, Rawls drew on Wittgenstein’s analogy of language to a game in order to
explain his willingness to rely on the agreement of reasonable men: because
reasoning was like a game played in conditions of disagreement, there was no
reason to play it in cases of agreement. Second, Rawls drew on Wittgenstein’s
account of the emotions in order to explain and legitimate the agreement of
reasonable men: agreement on moral judgments arose from natural human
feelings. Finally, Rawls drew on Quine’s account of explication as elimination
in order to explain why an analysis of moral feelings did not lead inexorably
and Historiographical Answers’, in The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-
evaluation and Future Perspectives, ed. F. Stadler (Dordrecht, 2003), pp. xi–xxi; T.E.
Uebel, ‘Anti-Foundationalism and the Vienna Circle’s Revolution in Philosophy’, Brit-
ish Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 47 (1996), pp. 415–40. And for the last: Logi-
cal Empiricism in North America, ed. G.L. Hardcastle and A.W. Richardson (Minneapo-
lis, 2003); J. Isaac, ‘W.V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United
States’, Modern Intellectual History, 2 (2005), pp. 205–34; J. Platt and P.K. Hoch, ‘The
Vienna Circle in the United States and Empirical Research Methods in Sociology’, in
Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Émigré German-Speaking Scientists and
Scholars After 1933, ed. M.G. Ash and A. Söllner (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 224–45; G.A.
Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of
Logic (Cambridge, 2005); J.H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-
Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago, 2004).
8 The analogy is to R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (London, 1937).
Modernist themes characterize various conceptions of analytic philosophy, including
those of Moore and Russell (J. Skorupski, ‘The Legacy of Modernism’, Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, 91 (1990–1), pp. 1–19), but we want to draw particular attention
to the way Carnap and Rawls used formal schemas to explain appearances.

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704 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

to one ethical framework: the justification of ethical principles was necessar-

ily holistic.

The Graduate Years

Rawls began his graduate studies at the Department of Philosophy, Princeton
University, in 1946. He had just finished nearly three years of military service
in the South Pacific. We now know that wartime experiences had eroded
Rawls’s Episcopalian beliefs and he no longer believed in a Christian god.9
He wanted to find another basis for his moralism — a moralism that arguably
still embodied much of protestant universalism. Rawls looked to philosophy
in his search for the objectivity of ethics.
Initially, Rawls’s conception of ethical theory was shaped by debates
surrounding reductionist naturalism and intuitionism.10 Naturalists, such as
Rawls’s professor, Walter T. Stace, claimed that ethical statements are true or
false according to their relationship to objective features of the world.11 In his
1946 essay, ‘A Brief Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ethical Theory’,
Rawls rejected this reduction of ethical to empirical statements on the grounds
that ethical language is distinctive. He appealed to our ‘language sense’ to
argue that because ‘ethical phrases have distinctive use’, they cannot be
defined ‘except in phrases which contain other ethical words’.12 Rawls’s
argument followed those of emotivists such as A.J. Ayer who thought that
ethical statements are ‘not equivalent to sentences which express psychologi-
cal propositions, or indeed empirical propositions of any kind’.13 Yet, unlike
Ayer, Rawls distinguished ethical statements from imperatives and injunc-
tions, insisting that although they were not factual propositions, one could
still judge them ‘reasonable’ or ‘unreasonable’.14
Rawls took it upon himself to provide standards by which one could judge
the reasonableness of ethical statements. The main account of such standards
derived from intuitionists such as G.E. Moore and W.D. Ross, who argued
that philosophical analysis attempts to increase understanding by reducing

9 Rawls, Meaning of Sin and Faith, pp. 259–69.

10 In this article, we use the term ‘naturalism’ to refer to three distinct positions: an
attempt to reduce ethical statements to statements about sense data, a broader under-
standing of ethics as a human activity, and the more particular claim that moral emotions
and commitments stem from natural emotions. In most cases, the context makes clear
which of the positions we have in mind; where it does not, we qualify the first as
‘reductionist’ and the second, for the lack of a better term, as ‘philosophical’.
11 W.T. Stace, The Concept of Morals (New York, 1939), esp. p. 18.
12 J. Rawls, ‘A Brief Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ethical Theory’, The
Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 7, Folder 3 (1946),
pp. 59, 22.
13 A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York, 1946), p. 105.
14 Rawls, ‘Nature of Ethical Theory’, pp. 25, 59.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 705

complex moral concepts to more basic ones.15 In their view, moral concepts
exist objectively, so there are moral facts, but these facts are known through
intuition, not inference. Rawls rejected intuitionism for much the same rea-
sons he rejected naturalism; he denied that people intuit an objective quality
of ‘goodness’, suggesting that the intuitionists had mistaken their uneasiness
with naturalist definitions for a ‘process of intuiting “rightness” ’.16
A rejection of intuitionism, as well as naturalism, left Rawls adrift in his
search for an objective basis for ethics. The intuitionists defended the objec-
tivity of moral judgments, while rejecting naturalism, by positing an ability to
intuit ‘goodness’. Rawls rejected just this move. He rejected not only a natu-
ralist view of ethical statements as factual propositions, but also the alterna-
tive basis that intuitionists gave to ethics.
Rawls’s own alternative relied on the logical positivist current within mod-
ernist thought. His bold idea was to establish an analogy between scientific
and ethical reasoning and thereby attribute the objectivity of scientific beliefs
to ethical ones. Rawls drew extensively here on the work of C.J. Ducasse,
with its modernist themes. All kinds of modernist thinkers rejected nineteenth-
century historicisms with their reliance on developmental diachronic narra-
tives to sift and relate facts.17 They understood the world in terms of atomized
facts and appearances, and turned to formalistic synchronic models, correla-
tions and classifications to explain these facts. The modernist emphasis on
atomism and formalism meant that historical contexts played little part in
their explanations of social phenomena. Modernist explanations thus resem-
bled museums, ‘where cultural artifacts are wrenched from their traditional
places and displayed in a new context of syncretism’.18
In the philosophical scene of the 1930s and 1940s, modernist themes were
most starkly apparent in logical positivism. Carnap wanted to construct a lan-
guage for all fields of knowledge, and he wanted to rest this language on
observation statements recording atomistic and elementary experiences. Ini-
tially, Carnap took these statements as the foundational ‘given’; they could
not be questioned or revised.19 He believed that if we used logical connectors
15 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 2000); W.D. Ross, The Right and the
Good (Oxford, 1930).
16 Rawls, ‘Nature of Ethical Theory’, p. 34.
17 For the rise of the modernist, and especially modernist empiricist modes of think-
ing, see Modern Political Science, ed. Adcock, Bevir and Stimson; W.R. Everdell, The
First Moderns (Chicago, 1997); T.M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectiv-
ity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995); M. Schabas, A World Ruled by Number:
William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, 1990).
18 D. Bell, ‘Modernism Mummified’, American Quarterly, 39 (1987), p. 122.
19 R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, trans. R.A. George (Berkeley, CA,
1969), pp. 1–29, 102. For Carnap’s turn from foundationalism to conventionalism, see
R. Carnap, ‘On Protocol Statements’, trans. R. Creath and R. Nolan, Noûs, 21 (1987),
pp. 457–70.

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706 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

to combine these experiences, we could elaborate axioms from which the

lower-level statements of the scientific language could be deduced.20
Carnap’s focus on this atomistic and formal structure led him to disregard
context and meaning. He suggested that because the content of elementary
experiences differed from person to person, we should ignore their content
and concentrate exclusively on the ‘formal description of the structure’ of
these experiences.21
Not all logical positivists relied so heavily on atomism and formalism. Pop-
per rejected Carnap’s atomism and ‘given’ on the grounds that no individual
experience can be said to be true or false.22 Popper argued that a theory could
be declared tentatively correct insofar as its ‘axioms’ or ‘postulates’ did not
contradict our ‘basic statements’ and basic judgments.23 Popper’s approach
was, therefore, less formal than Carnap’s, and it also gave a role to the intel-
lectual context since it required observers to agree on basic judgments. None-
theless, Popper believed that this agreement was unproblematic; he thought
that different people’s everyday observations would lead them to the same
judgments.24 On the whole, logical positivists thought that philosophy, like
science, should consist of formal structures or theories, the truth of which
could be tested against the judgments of the appropriate community. They did
not believe that conceptual differences hindered observers from making simi-
lar basic statements or judgments, nor did they think that radical conceptual
differences existed.
Ducasse and Rawls’s most original proposal was to extend logical positiv-
ism’s themes to ethics — a step that logical positivists themselves rejected.25
Ducasse treated ethics as a modernist science concerned with empirical facts
about moral judgments. As other sciences aim at formal theories from which
we can deduce and predict the appearances they study, so ethical theory tries
to discover formal premises from which we can deduce and thereby predict
people’s moral judgments. It might seem, especially if one rejects naturalism,
that the relation of theory to judgment is perilously circular, with the theory
relying on judgments to formulate the premises that then predict judgments.
Ducasse tried to avoid circularity by pressing on the analogy to a modernist
empiricist view of science. He suggested that the relevant moral judgments
were ‘empirical’ and ‘spontaneous’, rather than the result of consciously apply-
ing a prior ethical theory.26 In this view, the judgments are the appearances, the

20 Carnap, Logical Structure, p. 7.

21 Ibid., p. 29.
22 K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1959), pp. 44–8.
23 Ibid., pp. 93–111.
24 Ibid., pp. 102–3.
25 C.J. Ducasse, ‘The Nature and Function of Theory in Ethics’, Ethics, 51 (1940),
pp. 22–37.
26 Ibid., p. 29.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 707

theory is the formal language that accounts for them, and the objectivity of the
theory derives from its ability to predict the appearances. If our formal pre-
mises enable us to predict the spontaneous judgments, we can consider our
theory correct.
In 1946, Rawls welcomed Ducasse’s modernist understanding of ethics.27
Indeed, Rawls described his own theory as ‘ “physicalist” in the same sense as
this term was understood by the Vienna Circle’; that is to say, ‘an ethical theory
is to be refuted or confirmed by public and observable processes, to be spe-
cific, “word” processes’.28 At this time, Rawls began to appeal to the idea of
‘word processes’, which he modelled explicitly on Popper’s ‘basic state-
ments’. Word processes were utterances and judgments of the type: ‘This act
is right (wrong).’29 In Rawls’s view, the reasons why the act was right or
wrong would be shared by observers even though the utterance did not explic-
itly mention those reasons. Although in 1946 this idea of ‘word processes’
was underdeveloped, Rawls’s writings suggest that an acceptable ‘word pro-
cess’ had to meet two criteria: it had to be shared by a sufficient number of
ethical observers, and it had to rest on a deeply held, or confident, intuition.30
Logical positivism thus set the scene for Rawls’s initial conception of an
ethical theory. Rawls defined the task and content of ethical theory in positiv-
ist terms. He believed that an adequate ethical theory would explain and pre-
dict the ethical judgments that we make, and he believed that an adequate
ethical theory would consist of a formal set of axioms and principles from
which we could deduce these very judgments. Crucially, Rawls here found a
way of asserting the objectivity of ethics. He could argue that ethics had
exactly the same objectivity as any other modernist science. Ethics had an
empirical subject matter (the word processes associated with spontaneous
ethical judgments); and its formal theories, like all scientific theories, were
objective insofar as they enabled us to make accurate deductions and predic-
tions about this subject matter.
One obvious worry here concerns the extent of disagreement in spontane-
ous moral judgments. If people’s moral judgments constantly diverged, ethi-
cal theory would lack stable appearances on which to base itself. Of course, an
adequate theory might provide a way of resolving such disagreements. Rawls
argued, for example, that if we can show that our most important judgments
imply certain more general principles, then we can appeal to these principles
to solve cases in which we are uncertain or in disagreement. He wrote:
What is needed is a theory which will predict all those moral judgments
which we feel to be most certain of. We require a theory whose predictions
27 Rawls describes Ducasse’s essay as ‘excellent throughout on many points dis-
cussed here’ in Rawls, ‘Nature of Ethical Theory’, p. 9.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., pp. 8, 20–1.
30 Ibid., pp. 20, 53–4.

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708 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

correspond to our ‘deepest intuitions’. Once we have such a theory, it can

function as a mediator in cases of conflict. We can say to the disputants that
the theory in question explains what their moral judgments really are. If
our theory is adequate to forecast their ‘deepest feelings’ they will be con-
vinced, and assuming they wish to be consistent, they will agree to resolve
the conflict by applying the moral imperative according to the dictates of
the theory.31
Nonetheless, we can only resolve disagreements in this way after we reach
valid principles by theorizing our most important judgments. Rawls’s mod-
ernist project thus required a certain degree of initial agreement about sponta-
neous moral judgments. It was this requirement of agreement that led Rawls,
in a 1947 paper entitled ‘Remarks on Ethics’, to develop the idea of the ‘hypo-
thetical choice situation’, an early version of the ‘original position’.32 The
choice situation provided him with the means to overcome disagreement and
so to secure his empirical material. Rawls argued here that the choice situation
would show that — given certain constraints that we all accept — we all agree
on the same set of principles. Its core feature was the idea of the ‘reasonable
man’, or someone who knows what considerations are relevant to a particular
question.33 Clearly, Rawls hoped that he could escape any actual divergence
in judgment by appealing to a hypothetical figure that would be acceptable to
everyone. This hypothetical figure was to serve as the site of enough shared
judgments to enable us to construct a theory by which to determine the right
judgment in more uncertain or disputed cases.
Rawls’s initial definition of the ‘reasonable man’ was an attempt to navi-
gate between two dangers. On the one hand, he had to describe the ‘reason-
able man’ to include enough spontaneous judgments to motivate a theory or
set of principles. On the other, he had to avoid describing the ‘reasonable
man’ too thickly in case he thereby made his argument a purely circular one
from judgments to principles and back to the same judgments. Rawls here
defined the ‘reasonable man’ so that anyone, in principle, could be one. The
‘reasonable man’ was capable of knowing things, familiar with the canons of
evidence, willing to apply these canons of evidence, and so the possessor of a
few weakly delineated moral characteristics.34

31 Ibid., pp. 53–4; cf. Ducasse, ‘Theory in Ethics’, p. 36. All emphases in this paper
are Rawls’s.
32 The ‘original position’ first acquired its name in 1963. See J. Rawls, Collected
Papers, ed. S. Freeman (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 73–95.
33 J. Rawls, ‘Remarks on Ethics’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University
Archives, HUM 48 Box 9, Folder 15 (1947), §1, pp. 4, 3. Rawls’s ‘Remarks on Ethics’ at
Harvard University Archives bears a sticker that reads ‘1946’, yet the essay contains a
reference to A.C. Ewing, Definition of Good (New York, 1947) (Rawls, ‘Remarks on
Ethics’, §6, p. 21). We thus suspect that the paper was written during or after 1947.
34 Rawls, ‘Remarks on Ethics’, §5, p. 18.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 709

Crucially, when Rawls initially appealed to the ‘reasonable man’, he was

uncertain how much work it could do. In 1946, he relied on our language
sense, or our agreement in judgments, to proceed with his argument. How-
ever, from 1947 onwards he appeared to claim simultaneously that the agree-
ment of reasonable people was the ultimate basis of justification, and yet that
this agreement could be explained and so justified. Rawls laid out the first
position most thoroughly in his 1947 ‘Remarks on Ethics’. There he claimed
that we should treat the moral judgments of reasonable people as a boundary
beyond which we could no longer provide justification. It was unreasonable
to ask for further justifications of agreed judgments:
In ethics one can justify a moral principle by considering its denial, and
noting the inherent absurdity and impoverishment of human life to which it
leads, and one appeals to the voluntary agreement of reasonable men
throughout the tradition to mark off the point where one need no longer feel
obligated to answer the request for justification. By carrying our justifica-
tion this far we have done all that can be done; and the moral skeptic is using
the word ‘justification’ in such a way that it is logically impossible to satisfy
him.35
The moral philosopher could use agreed judgments to show that a certain ethi-
cal principle was absurd or that it greatly impoverished human life, but there
was nothing else to be said to justify these judgments.
In ‘Remarks on Ethics’ and his dissertation of 1950, Rawls explored the
alternative possibility of explaining and justifying the agreements associated
with ‘the reasonable man’. He still suggested that these agreements were
objective simply because the method of explicating them was veridical or reli-
able.36 Yet he also hinted at the reasons for agreement. Early in the disserta-
tion, for example, he mentioned ‘an objective factor residing in the inspected
situation which serves to control and to unify the spontaneous judgments of
different people’.37 He raised the same possibility later in the dissertation but
still without explaining why different people would agree in their judgments:
We may also think that just as our common perceptions are caused by, and
controlled by, an objective order to events, so we have some reason to think
that there is a common objective moral fact which causes and controls our
moral judgments, although I leave aside the question as to how this com-
mon objective moral fact is to be interpreted.38

35 Ibid., §5, p. 2.
36 J. Rawls, ‘A Study in The Grounds of Ethical Knowledge: Considered with Refer-
ence to Judgments on the Moral Worth of Character’, PhD diss., Princeton University
(1950), pp. 274–5, 272.
37 Ibid., pp. 47–8.
38 Ibid., p. 278.

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710 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

It seems that Rawls was not quite content to take the moral judgments of rea-
sonable people for granted. Part of him wanted to make a more foundational
appeal to an ‘objective order’ — although not one that people intuit.
Logical positivism, and modernism more broadly, led Rawls to attempt to
base an ethical theory on our spontaneous moral judgments. The figure of the
‘reasonable man’ was a significant step towards specifying the content of
these judgments. However, logical positivism seemed unable to provide a sat-
isfactory account of why reasonable men would agree on important judg-
ments. Large parts of Rawls’s intellectual development reflect his attempt to
provide just such an account. To begin, during his Instructorship at Princeton
(1950–2) and the following year at Oxford (1952–3), Rawls recast ethics in
terms of purposeful human activity, which allowed him to inquire into rea-
sons for agreement without references to ‘objective factors’ that had danger-
ously pulled him towards intuitionism.

The Turn to Naturalism

Human activity was a leading theme in the later philosophical naturalism of
Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, philosophers explored the grammar of the
concepts embedded in human practices and forms of life. Wittgenstein’s later
work remained unpublished during Rawls’s education, but he encountered it
through the writings and discussions of Wittgenstein’s followers, as well as
through Wittgenstein’s private notes, which were circulating widely by 1940.
For example, in 1942 Rawls studied social philosophy with Norman Malcolm,
a student and friend of Wittgenstein’s, who taught at Princeton from 1940 to
1942.39 It was probably Malcolm who introduced Rawls to Wittgenstein’s
Blue Book — a manuscript in which Wittgenstein developed many of the
themes of his later philosophy.40 Certainly, by 1946, Rawls was already list-
ing the Blue Book in his bibliography and referring to the work of another of
Wittgenstein’s followers, John Wisdom.41 Yet Rawls was not convinced. He
accepted certain Wittgensteinian insights about language, but he did not see
them as either superior than or damaging to his modernist empiricist approach
to ethics.
Rawls became notably more interested in Wittgensteinian themes in the
early 1950s. He prepared outlines for a lecture course — most probably a
course on ethics that he gave in 1951–2 — that include favourable references
to moral philosophers who had been influenced by Wittgenstein, notably

39 N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New York, 2001); A. Serafini,

‘Norman Malcolm: A Memoir’, Philosophy, 68 (1993), pp. 309–24.
40 L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books — Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philo-
sophical Investigations’ (New York, 1965), p. vii.
41 Rawls, ‘Nature of Ethical Theory’, pp. 64, 1.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 711

Stuart Hampshire and Stephen Toulmin, whose book Rawls reviewed.42

Wittgensteinian ideas about language began to seep into Rawls’s positivism.
Rawls suggested that philosophers might learn about meanings by looking at
the use of relevant terms, a suggestion that had been recently made, following
Wittgenstein, by both Hampshire and Toulmin.43 Toulmin in particular had
emphasized that a focus on meaning-as-use required treating ethical reason-
ing as purposeful activity. Ethical reasoning is, in this view, something that
humans do. Rawls first expressed this idea that ethical reasoning is activity in
his lectures of 1951–2. He developed it further during the following academic
year, which, on the advice of J.O. Urmson, a visiting professor at Princeton
between 1950 and 1951, he spent at Christ Church, Oxford.44
With hindsight, it is easy to understand the appeal of Wittgenstein’s ideas to
Rawls. Rawls had earlier dismissed moral naturalism for ignoring the distinc-
tive use of ethical words. More importantly, Rawls saw analogies between, on
the one hand, Wittgenstein’s comparison of language-use to a game and, on
the other, his analysis of ethical reasoning. He wrote: ‘Reasoning is an activ-
ity. It is something that men do’.45 Rawls did not think that reasoning was a
game, but he thought that comparing it to a game highlighted some of its
important features. More particularly, he used the analogy between ethical
reasoning and games to justify his belief that philosophers could find a set of
formal ethical principles to account for the moral judgments of reasonable
men. He argued that games and reasoning are activities carried out in accord-
ance with certain rules or principles that ‘govern what is to be accepted as a
good reason, and rejected as a bad reason’.46 Just as without agreement on
rules the game would collapse, so, by analogy, without agreed principles there
could be no ethical reasoning. Rawls thus concluded that the objectivity of
ethical theory depended on whether or not there were such principles or rules
of the game.47
During his year at Oxford, Rawls pursued these Wittgensteinian themes.
He asked how philosophers could determine whether or not there were any
formal principles or rules of the game in ethical reasoning. His answer was
42 J. Rawls, ‘Meaning of Good’, in J. Rawls, ‘Ethics and Its Reasoning 1950–52’.
The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 8, Folder 3
[1950–2?], pp. 1, 10; J. Rawls, ‘Review of Stephen Toulmin’s An Examination of the
Place of Reason in Ethics’, Philosophical Review, 60 (1951), pp. 572–80.
43 S. Hampshire, ‘Fallacies in Moral Philosophy’, Mind, 58 (1949), pp. 480–1;
S. Toulmin, An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 23,
64, 194–5.
44 Pogge, John Rawls, p. 16.
45 J. Rawls, ‘Moral Reasoning and Its Problems’, in Rawls, ‘Ethics and Its Reason-
ing’, p. 1.
46 Ibid., p. 2.
47 J. Rawls, ‘Classification of Ethical Theories’, in Rawls, ‘Ethics and Its Reason-
ing’, p. 2.

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712 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

that, because there was no rule-making body in ethics, philosophers had to

begin by looking to the judgments of competent men and seeing if these judg-
ments could be explained in terms of formal principles.48 His reply to the
sceptic still hinged on a modernist appeal to a formal syntax or structure that
underlay judgments or appearances. The point was:
Simply that if one asks whether or not there is such a thing as moral reason-
ing, then this question can be answered by seeing whether or not it is the
case that the considered judgments of competent judges are in fact such that
they can be accounted for on the assumption that there is a set of criteria for
distinguishing between good and bad reasons which is accepted by them
and which governs their acceptance and rejection of offered reasons . . .
Basically it is a question of empirical fact whether there is moral reasoning
or not.49
Rawls continued to explore these ideas after he returned from Oxford and had
been hired by Cornell. For example, in 1954 he taught a class on Christian
Ethics in which he argued:
[P]hilosophers are inclined to take for granted a certain group of judgments
on certain cases as being inescapable — that is, we don’t understand how
they can be incorrect — and we try to formulate forms of reasons to account
for these judgments.50
Rawls viewed the moral philosopher as in part a logician whose task it was to
make explicit the criteria used in our commonly shared judgments. In this
way, Rawls assimilated Wittgensteinian themes into his own positivist pro-
ject, thereby weakening his earlier analogies between reasoning in science
and reasoning in ethics. Nonetheless, despite Rawls’s assimilation of some
Wittgensteinian themes, he remained decidedly modernist and positivist in
his aim of crafting formal principles to explain appearances and in his reliance
on basic judgments to justify these principles.
Rawls’s assimilation of Wittgenstein was, however, not seamless. On the
contrary, Wittgenstein’s philosophical naturalism, with its emphasis on human
activity and meaning-as-use, was in clear tension with Rawls’s modernism.

48 J. Rawls, ‘On Explication Oxford 1952–3’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard
University Archives, HUM 48 Box 7, Folder 18 (1952–3), p. 64. It is clear that the com-
petent class encompasses every nation and continent: ‘The question whether there can
be reasoning about a certain kind of question turns on whether or not that part of the con-
stitutional body which sits in England agrees with that part of it which sits in India; or
whether that part of it which sits in America agrees with that part of it which sits in Cen-
tral Africa. Or if they do not now agree, can they upon mutual discussion and reflection
come to an agreement on what the rules should be [?]’ Ibid.
49 Ibid., pp. 76, 77.
50 J. Rawls, ‘Lectures 1+2: Some General Remarks on Christian Ethics’, in J. Rawls,
‘Christian Ethics: Class at Cornell’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University
Archives, HUM 48 Box 8, Folder 5 (1954), p. 1.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 713

Several Wittgensteinian themes implied sweeping objections to all modernist

projects. Rawls’s engagement with Wittgenstein thus posed a number of
dilemmas, and as, over time, he responded to these dilemmas, so he redefined
his project.
The main dilemma arose from Wittgenstein’s scepticism about the im-
portance of discovering agreement and commonalities. In the Blue Book,
Wittgenstein explicitly regretted the contemporary tendency to search for a
common element in various uses of a word.51 He argued — surely correctly —
that the search for commonalities reflected an excessive preoccupation with
natural science and its ‘method of reducing the explanation of natural phe-
nomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws’.52 In his
view, this method prevented philosophers from analysing particular situa-
tions, and thus seeing that the various uses of a word often did not have any
one thing in common but, rather, shared a kind of family resemblance.53
Clearly, though, this method was exactly the modernist one that informed
Rawls’s own project. Moreover, both Hampshire and Toulmin had used
Wittgenstein’s argument explicitly to attack modernist agendas in ethics, so
Rawls was surely aware of both the argument and its relevance to his proj-
ect.54
Rawls now significantly altered his response to the philosophical issues
posed by the diverse uses of words. He had raised and dismissed a similar
challenge as early as his 1946 essay, ‘Nature and Function of Ethical Theory’.
There he considered how various uses of the word ‘good’ refer to different
qualities, as in ‘good race-horse’ and ‘good work-horse’, and he concluded
that ‘good’ means different things according to the context.55 However, he
continued, despite the different meanings of ‘good’, all uses of ‘good’ have a
common function; they direct attention to identifying those characteristics of
an object that make it good.56 It is, he concluded, ‘a mistake to say that
because a word intends different characteristics of each instance of usage that
it must have no definite meaning and that no theory of its semantical usage can
be given’.57
After Rawls encountered Wittgenstein, he altered his response to the
diverse uses of words. In his lectures of 1951–2, he explicitly agreed with
Hampshire that ‘a search for definitions or verbal equivalences is often done
under the assumption that there must be some single sufficient reason from
which one must always and necessarily base one’s judgment; and further that
51 Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 17.
52 Ibid., p. 18.
53 Ibid., p. 17.
54 Hampshire, ‘Fallacies’, p. 481; Toulmin, Reason in Ethics, pp. 160–3.
55 Rawls, ‘Nature of Ethical Theory’, pp. 55–6.
56 Ibid., p. 56.
57 Ibid.

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714 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

this is a mistake’.58 Yet Rawls still thought that ethical theory aimed at formal
principles by which to decide cases. Indeed, in the same lecture series, he
argued that utilitarianism was more successful than rule-intuitionism because
it posited a single principle by which to decide cases in which prima-facie
duties conflict.59 It seems, therefore, that Rawls wanted to combine his positivist
project with a Wittgensteinian scepticism towards agreement and commonal-
ity. Presumably he believed that the Wittgensteinian position required only
that he adopt a plurality of principles or allow principles to have plural con-
tent. When he later published A Theory of Justice, his principle of liberty was
certainly wide enough to permit various liberties, and so reasons, to enter into
moral judgments.60
Soon after Rawls gave his 1951–2 lectures, he again modified his response
to the diverse uses of words. He became less directly concerned with appeal-
ing to principles to resolve moral disagreements about cases. He suggested
that it might be difficult to get agreement on cases because, when people rea-
son about them, they can have different objectives and no consensus on how
to weight these objectives.61 In this view, people have different backgrounds
and experiences that lead them to put different weight on various principles
and so to disagree about particular instances. Ethical reasoning is thus ‘logi-
cally loose: a way of patterning, arranging and testing for valid argument, but
not a mechanical way of grinding them out’.62 This statement is Rawls’s first
admission that agreement on courses of action may not actually arise even
among people who reason appropriately. It entailed a shift in his project and
the role within it of principles. He redefined his project less in terms of getting
people to reason appropriately and more in terms of getting them to reason
against a shared background. The role of principles is less as guides to
clear-cut decisions about cases, and more as ‘pointing out what sorts of facts
will be relevant’.63
Once Rawls redefined his task as identifying the formal principles of a shared
background to ethical reasoning, he could incorporate other Wittgensteinian
themes into his project. As we have seen, Rawls now used the analogy
between language and games to reinforce his modernist belief in identifying
principles that accounted for judgments. In addition, he drew on the same
analogy to specify the nature of philosophical analysis in ethics. By 1955 he
was arguing that a game, being an activity constituted by a system of rules, is a

58Rawls, ‘Meaning of Good’, p. 1.

59Rawls, ‘Classification of Ethical Theories’, p. 12.
60 For a contemporary critique see H.L.A. Hart, ‘Rawls on Liberty and Its Priority’,
University of Chicago Law Review, 40 (1973), pp. 534–55.
61 J. Rawls, ‘Diseases of Ethical Reasoning’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard
University Archives, HUM 48 Box 8, Folder 4 [1952], p. 5.
62 Ibid., p. 2.
63 Ibid.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 715

social practice, and therefore that the philosopher who studies such rules is a
student of social practices.64 Rawls’s emphasis on social practices in A Theory
of Justice thus derives from his encounter with Wittgenstein.65 Indeed, his
focus on the most important social institutions (what he called ‘the basic
structure of society’) also emerged at this time. It is in his notes for his 1954
class at Cornell that, for the first time, he defines the function of ‘justice’ as
deciding between competing claims, and the scope of ‘justice’ in terms of
social institutions.66
Rawls briefly experimented with one other application of the Wittgen-
steinian idea of a game. For a while, Rawls thought he had new reasons to
defend a reliance on the judgments of reasonable men. As ethical reasoning is
like a game that has the aim of adjudicating competing claims, the absence of
competing claims means the game cannot be played. Thus, in the absence of
disagreement, there is no need to give further reasons; when people agree,
they can accept their common judgments without further questions. As Rawls
explained, ‘if there is general willingness to stand on it [whatever the opinion
is in question] there is no (general) obligation to give any further reasons, for
the obligation to give reasons only arises where there is not general agree-
ment’.67
This last use of the Wittgensteinian idea of a game was, however, unsatis-
factory, and Rawls soon dropped it. One problem was that there are reasons
why people might play the game even if they agree. Rawls himself had listed
some of these reasons in his lectures of 1951–2, arguing, for example, that
curiosity might lead people to inquire about the grounds of shared judg-
ments.68 Another problem was probably that the argument is weak. It just does
not seem to be the case that people adjudicate competing claims only in cases
of disagreement. On the contrary, social institutions have to distribute rele-
vant goods on a daily basis, and disagreement arises only when people think
that this distribution is awry. The main problem, however, was that, even if
the argument worked, the sceptic could still ask why reasonable men were
expected to play the reasoning game using a particular set of rules. By what
standards are those rules better than others? In his Cornell class, Rawls him-
self pointed towards just such sceptical questions when he noted that the phi-

64 Rawls, Collected Papers, pp. 20 f.

65 J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), pp. 54–5.
66 J. Rawls, ‘Some Questions’, in Rawls, ‘Christian Ethics’, p. 4i. Rawls only num-
bered the recto in his handwritten notes. We marked the recto as (i) and the verso as (ii).
So, sheet 4 consists of both 4i and 4ii.
67 J. Rawls, ‘Statement and Discussion of Principles of Explication’, in J. Rawls,
‘Oxford Notes, Spring 1953’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives,
HUM 48 Box 7, Folder 2 (1953), p. 13.
68 Rawls, ‘Moral Reasoning and Its Problems’, p. 6.

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716 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

losopher’s task was not just to reason from agreement, but also to ask what
grounds we had for trusting such agreement.69
So, during the four years after completing his thesis, Rawls recast his mod-
ernist and positivist project in response to Wittgensteinian ideas about human
activity and games. Rawls now wanted a concept of justice to adjudicate com-
peting claims to social goods by appealing to reasoning based on the judg-
ments of reasonable men. Yet he then faced the sceptical challenge that the
ethical theorist should not just reason from these judgments, but also probe
the expectation that reasonable men would agree. During his remaining years
at Cornell, two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960–2),
and his first years at Harvard, Rawls found a way to silence the inner sceptic.
Wittgenstein’s insights about language allowed him to explain moral feelings
as an extension of natural emotions and thereby provide grounds for the judg-
ments of reasonable men.

Naturalizing Human Emotions

When G.E.M. Anscombe translated and published the first English edition of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Rawls studied it in great
detail, writing a summary and minutely indexing it.70 More generally, Rawls
found Cornell a congenial environment in which to continue to pursue
Wittgensteinian themes in an attempt to devise reasons for relying on the
moral judgments of reasonable people. Malcolm was a member of the Cornell
faculty for the entire six years Rawls was there. Rogers Albritton, who was
powerfully influenced by Wittgenstein, was also at Cornell from 1954 to
1957. Finally, Georg Henrik von Wright, one of Wittgenstein’s students and
one of his three literary executors, joined the Department of Philosophy at
Cornell two years before Rawls left for Harvard.71
In Autumn 1958, Rawls offered a seminar on moral psychology that shows
the influence of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued that to understand a word
is not to have an appropriate picture in one’s mind, but to be able to use the
word correctly, often with corresponding facial expressions and tone of voice.
Rawls began his seminar on moral psychology by explicitly stating: ‘With
Wittgenstein we shall assume that having a concept is essentially mastering

69 Rawls, ‘Lectures 1+2’, p. 1.

70 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude E.M. Anscombe
(New York, 1953); J. Rawls, ‘Wittgenstein investigation, lexicon’, The Papers of John
Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 60 [1953?]; J. Rawls, ‘Wittgenstein
Criteria’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 9,
Folder 8 [1953?]; J. Rawls, ‘Wittgenstein Investigations’, The Papers of John Rawls,
Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 9, Folder 2 [1953?].
71 G.H. von Wright, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Biographical Sketch’, Philosophical
Review, 64 (1955), pp. 527–45.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 717

the use of a word in its proper background of thought and feeling.’72

Wittgenstein led him to reject ‘the tendency to think that one studies the feel-
ing by trying to recall what the feeling is like’.73 Rawls argued instead that we
should study moral feelings by paying attention to the use of a word, the fam-
ily of expressions to which it belongs, and the ‘forms of feeling and conduct
and reactions which go along with its correct use’.74
Rawls’s modernist project had long involved showing how moral judg-
ments could be accounted for in terms of formal principles. Now he suggested
that as our moral feelings embody our judgments, an analysis of these feelings
illuminates the principles that inform moral judgments. Much of his seminars
on moral psychology consisted of analyses of particular emotions.75 Yet this
analysis of moral emotions (such as remorse and indignation) touched on
broader issues. Rawls used the analysis to assess ethical theories against an
understanding of what it is to be human. He dismissed determinism by
arguing that it would require us to treat human beings as if they lacked
intentionality.76 More importantly, he defended rationality by arguing that it
was an integral member of a family of concepts related to choosing.77
An appeal to moral psychology provided Rawls with a way to explain
agreement among reasonable men and thereby fend off scepticism. Rawls
began his argument with the claims that human beings have attitudes, inter-
ests, desires and emotions, and they can perform various social roles.78 People
are capable of choosing among roles in accord with their attitudes. They are
rational in that they are capable of deliberating and deciding among alterna-
tives. Rawls argued that to treat others as human, rather than as objects, is pre-
cisely to recognize them as capable of reflective choices based on their
intentionality. Next, Rawls posed the question of why we treat people in this
way, not just as objects. He distinguished between moral feelings (such as
indignation or remorse) and natural ones (such as affection, pride, sympathy),

72 J. Rawls, ‘Procedure’, in J. Rawls, ‘Moral Feeling I (1958)’, The Papers of John

Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 34, Folder 19 (1958), p. 1i.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Some of the material, such as the discussion of shame, was included in Rawls,
Theory of Justice, pp. 442–6.
76 J. Rawls, ‘Discussion of Determinism with Gauthier, Savage and Shoemaker
(November 23, 1956)’, in J. Rawls, ‘Concluding and Deciding’, The Papers of John
Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 7, Folder 1 (1956), p. 1i.
77 J. Rawls, ‘The Grounds of Principles of Rational Choice’, in J. Rawls, ‘Rational
Choice and The Concept of Goodness. Seminars 1956’, The Papers of John Rawls, Har-
vard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 9, Folder 3 (1956), p. 6i.
78 J. Rawls, ‘Topic IX: Compassion’, in Rawls, ‘Moral Feeling I (1958)’, p. 5i. He
also wrote: ‘I shall not argue that there are persons in the world; I assume this to be the
case. It is obvious that this is the case, once we see what persons are.’ J. Rawls, ‘Topic X:
The Consistent Sadist’, in Rawls, ‘Moral Feeling I (1958)’, p. 1i.

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718 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

arguing that explanations of the former, but not the latter, require the use of
ethical concepts.79 His crucial move was then to suggest that the possession of
natural feelings requires us to treat people as humans.80 To have natural feelings
just is, therefore, to have moral feelings.81 Moral attitudes are just extensions of
their natural counterparts.82 Rawls then stated the implications of his argu-
ment in various ways. He claimed that natural emotions make morality
‘rational and intelligible’.83 And later, in the following lecture, he claimed that
natural emotions were the basis or grounds of morality.84 Generally, the clear
implication was that moral reasoning and perhaps even morality itself had a
basis in our nature. Rawls thereby responded to the sceptic by grounding the
agreement of reasonable men in natural emotions.
It is worth emphasizing what Rawls’s argument was and was not meant to
do. His argument provided a reasoned explanation for an agreement among
reasonable people were there indeed any such agreement; but it did not estab-
lish that there was any such agreement. Likewise, it undermined the idea that
any principle could count as an ethical principle — we could not extend our
natural emotions to arbitrary principles such as those about driving on one or
other side of the road; but it did not show that there was one uniquely correct
way to extend our natural emotions to moral ones.85 Generally, Rawls had
fended off a sceptical challenge to his modernist project; but he had not ful-
filled that project by identifying principles that explain moral judgments.
Later, Rawls appealed to the original position both to do the work here
given to moral feelings as well as to establish the principles of justice. In
1964, he wrote that the original position provided the means to show that not
all principles could be ethical principles.86 The original position was also
meant to show, of course, that one particular set of principles of justice was
preferable to all others. Once the original position came into play, therefore,
Rawls no longer needed to appeal to moral psychology to explain why we
should expect the agreement of reasonable men. Moral psychology then came
79 Rawls, ‘Procedure’, p. 2i.
80 Rawls, ‘Topic IX: Compassion’, p. 1i.
81 Ibid.
82 J. Rawls, ‘Topic III: Shame’, in Rawls, ‘Moral Feeling I (1958)’, p. 1i.
83 Rawls, ‘Procedure’, p. 1ii.
84 J. Rawls, ‘Topic I: The Study of Moral Feelings’, in Rawls, ‘Moral Feeling I
(1958)’, p. 7i.
85 Rawls suggested that any identification of natural emotions with one appropriate
moral extension would be a mere matter of definition. See Rawls, ‘Topic IX: Compas-
sion’, p. 3i. This suggestion echoes Wittgenstein’s view that any attempt to draw a sharp
boundary around a concept would fail to capture its diverse uses. See Wittgenstein, The
Blue and Brown Books, p. 19.
86 J. Rawls, ‘Seminar IV: Excellence and Shame (I)’, in J. Rawls, ‘Excellence and
Shame (1964)’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box
35, Folder 4 (1964), p. 3i.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 719

to play a different role in Rawls’s thought; it showed that the conception of

justice chosen in the original position was psychologically plausible. How-
ever, before Rawls could fully bring the original position into play, he had to
make it fit alongside his Wittgensteinian naturalism, which he did by drawing
on Quine’s idea of ‘analysis as elimination’.

Meeting Quine
Rawls held a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1959–60, and then spent two
years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to Har-
vard in 1962. He met Quine during his first sojourn at Harvard.87 Quine’s
influence would transform Rawls’s views of philosophical analysis and the
status of the principles of justice. Rawls had long believed that his modernist
project could result in discovered principles by which to resolve disagree-
ments. It was, however, only after meeting Quine that he began to call these
principles a ‘replacement schema’ and even to suggest that people use them
instead of their more spontaneous judgments in their everyday life.
According to Quine, philosophical analysis aimed to clarify an original
expression (S) with a more useful one (S’), where S’ was more useful than S
if its terms were clearer and, in particular, if its terms helped us to avoid
philosophical problems associated with the original expression. Quine,
acknowledging a debt to Wittgenstein, described this process of analysis as
‘elimination’:
A similar view can be taken of every case of explication: explication is
elimination. We have, to begin with, an expression or form of expression
that is somehow troublesome. It behaves partly like a term but not enough
so, or it is vague in ways that bother us, or it puts kinks in a theory or encour-
ages one or another confusion. But it also serves certain purposes that are
not to be abandoned. Then we find a way of accomplishing those same pur-
poses through other channels, using other and less troublesome forms of
expression. The old perplexities are resolved. According to an influential
doctrine of Wittgenstein’s, the task of philosophy is not to solve problems
but to dissolve them by showing that there were really none there. This doc-
trine has its limitations, but it aptly fits explication. For when explication
banishes a problem it does so by showing it to be in an important sense
unreal, viz., in the sense of proceeding only from needless usages.88
Rawls had long thought that an appeal to more general principles might
show some moral judgments to be, upon reflection, incorrect. Now, he drew
on Quine’s ideas to redescribe this type of analysis, arguing that it could lead
to the rejection not only of judgments but also of ethical concepts. Rawls
claimed that his principles were superior replacements for the concepts that
87 J. Rawls, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard Univer-
sity Archives, HUM 48 Box 42 Folder 12 [1993?], p. 21.
88 W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA, 1960), p. 260.

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720 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

people currently used: ‘the replacements provided are clearer and more
readily intelligible than the original concepts’.89 He even described the result
of his analysis as elimination:
I maintain that we all could agree to eliminate ethical terms in this way: that
is, so to replace them (or to abandon them). I’m inclined to think that this
would be a good thing, and look forward to the time when all (unanalyzed)
ethical talk ceases and the emotive or the rhetorical use of moral terms dis-
appears.90
Here Rawls explicitly followed Quine in arguing that valid elimination
depended on the substitute expression preserving everything of importance in
the original:
What I would claim as a sufficient minimum (at least) is that there is a natu-
ralistic theory which can be substituted for the ordinary conception and
which allows for what we want on reflection with nothing important being
left out. (Quine’s view of explication as elimination; example of ordered
pair as defined in logic as substitute for notion of relation).91
In particular, Rawls argued that, in ethical theory, elimination had to preserve
the distinctive, non-factual uses of moral expressions. Any adequate substi-
tute expression would have to show why moral language commends and con-
demns actions and states of affairs in a way that has a moving appeal.92 Rawls
proposed preserving the distinctive force of moral expressions by appealing
to J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts.93 He proposed that his analysis of ‘jus-
tice’ could preserve its specifically ethical aspects by appealing to an account
of the way in which some speech acts commend or condemn.94 As Rawls
wrote: ‘the idea is to avail oneself [of] Austin’s doctrine as a way of adding to
naturalistic theories so as to enable them to account for the fact that we use
ethical terms to advise, praise, recommend, etc’.95
In order to adopt Quine’s idea of elimination, Rawls changed the emphasis
of several other bits of his theory. One change was the increased importance
89 J. Rawls, ‘Chapter IX Goodness and Rationality’, The Papers of John Rawls, Har-
vard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 35, Folder 17 (1961–62), p. 6ii.
90 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture Notes for Philosophy 169 (1966)’, in J. Rawls, ‘Analytic Ethics
and Justification. 1966–7’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives,
HUM 48 Box 5, Folder 6 (1966–67), p. 3ii.
91 J. Rawls, ‘Seminar VII: Fidelity & Trust (1964)’, in J. Rawls, ‘Excellence and
Shame (1964)’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box
35, Folder 4 (1964), p. 1i.
92 J. Rawls, ‘Seminar I: The Problem of Moral Psychology’, in Rawls, ‘Excellence
and Shame (1964)’, p. 2ii.
93 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York, 1973).
94 J. Rawls, ‘Seminar I: The Problem of Moral Psychology’, in Rawls, ‘Excellence
and Shame (1964)’, p. 3i.
95 Rawls, ‘Seminar VII: Fidelity & Trust’, p. 1.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 721

Rawls gave to the purpose of principles of justice. As we have seen, Rawls

specified one function of his theory before meeting Quine: justice was the
virtue of social institutions, and the aim of a theory of justice was to adjudicate
among competing claims for social goods.96 Yet, after Rawls adopted Quine’s
view of analysis, he gave considerably more prominence to the purpose of his
theory. In his lectures of 1966, Rawls claimed, ‘in morals we can in general
presuppose no purpose, unless indeed it is these expressed by the OP [the
original position] — to adjudicate claims by general principles, etc’.97 Then,
in 1967, he explicitly claimed, ‘we may think of moral principles as having a
certain social function or task’.98 He then went on to define the function of his
principles to include not only adjudicating claims but also encouraging cer-
tain things as good and as ideals.99 In 1970, he made it clear that reference to
the function of morality was one of the arguments for the formal conditions of
the concept of justice.100
The second, and more important, change Rawls made in adopting Quine’s
ideas was to move towards an explicitly holistic view of justification. He now
insisted that the justification of ethical principles necessarily applied to the
whole theory — a theory of justice could not derive from a defence of its con-
stituent parts. Quine’s holistic view was that a change in the meaning of one
term affects the meanings of the surrounding terms in what he would later call
the web of beliefs.101 This holism was integral to Quine’s account of analysis.
In Quine’s view, the justification of an analysis was that the new expression
resolved problems that the original expression created for the rest of the web
of beliefs. Rawls came to adopt just this holistic view of justification. Later, in
A Theory of Justice, he would write:
For our purposes here I accept the view that a sound analysis is best under-
stood as providing a satisfactory substitute, one that meets certain desider-
ata while avoiding certain obscurities and confusions. In other words,
explication is elimination: we start with a concept the expression for which
is somehow troublesome; but it serves certain ends that cannot be given up.
An explication achieves these ends in other ways that are relatively free of
difficulty. Thus if the theory of justice as fairness, or more generally of
rightness as fairness, fits our considered judgments in reflective equilib-
rium, and if it enables us to say all that on due examination we want to say,
96 Rawls, ‘Some Questions’, p. 4i.
97 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture Notes for Philosophy 171’, in Rawls, ‘Analytic Ethics and Justi-
fication. 1966–7’, p. 3i.
98 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture Notes for Philosophy 169 (1967)’, in Rawls, ‘Analytic Ethics
and Justification. 1966–7’, p. 4ii.
99 Ibid., pp. 4ii–5i.
100 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture VIII: The Function of Morality’, in J. Rawls, ‘Phil 169 (Fall
1970) Lects IX–XIV. Theory of Value’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University
Archives, HUM 48 Box 5, Folder 12 (1970), p. 3i.
101 W.V.O. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York, 1970).

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722 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

then it provides a way of eliminating customary phrases in favor of other

expressions.102
For Rawls, a substitute expression, such as his theory, was better than the
original if it caused fewer problems for our whole set of judgments.
A holistic account of justification was not entirely new to Rawls. When he
was visiting Oxford in 1952–3, he set out to defend ethical principles as a
set.103 However it was only in the late 1960s that Rawls explicitly adapted
Quine’s view to conclude that the justification of a theory was, firstly, relative
to other theories, and so, secondly, not an absolute matter. He wrote:
I think that this emphasis on justification [that analytic philosophy places],
at least at the outset, is unfortunate. The reason this is so is that the justifica-
tion of an ethical conception rests on the consilience of many kinds of con-
siderations and upon a judgment of the relative advantage of one set of
ethical principles over another.104
This holism altered Rawls’s view of the epistemic standing of ethical theories
and their relationship to substantive moral judgments. From now on, his mod-
ernist project would be not only naturalized but also conceived more as a
guide than a formal explanation.
For a start, Rawls now concluded that different bits of knowledge might
have different degrees of objectivity. He continued to adhere to a demanding
standard of ‘objectivity’: a principle was objective if there were reasons suffi-
cient to lead every rational person to act on it.105 His examples, such as the
rejection of wanton cruelty, suggest that principles were objective insofar as
the decision about them was clear for each reasonable man and insofar as a
sufficient number of reasonable men agreed on them.106 Even now, Rawls did
not make a sharp distinction between the two requirements, which indicates
his belief that they would go hand in hand. In that respect, Rawls’s earlier
positivist conviction that the conceptual frameworks of reasonable men are
sufficiently similar lingered on. Yet he no longer believed that there was any
complete set of principles that would meet this demanding standard. Instead,
he suggested that there were degrees of justification. In this view, different
bits of a valid ethical theory might have different levels of support. Again, as
102 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 111.
103 ‘We are not obliged to provide reasons for principles separately; we only need to
show that once the account is understood as the joint working of a number of principles,
then it is, so far as we can tell, an accurate account of what competent persons take as
good reasons for their considered judgments, and an account such that a competent per-
son is willing to admit that he stands on it without further reasons, whether or not further
reasons can be given’. Rawls, ‘Statement and Discussion of Principles of Explication’,
p. 13.
104 Rawls, ‘Lecture Notes for Philosophy 169 (1967)’, p. 1i.
105 Ibid., p. 1ii.
106 Ibid.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 723

Rawls wrote, ‘I think there are degrees of justification in that certain parts of
morality are more justifiable, more objective, than others’.107 More con-
cretely, Rawls suggested now that there might be alternative viable principles
for the distribution of income.
In addition, Rawls therefore placed a new, for him, stress on the study of
different substantive concepts of justice. He suggested that a proper evalua-
tion of alternative viable sets of ethical principles, and any informed choice
between them, depended on a suitable elaboration of substantive concepts.
Studies of different substantive concepts of justice were necessary for a proper
grasp of alternative theories and their rival merits. As Rawls explained, ‘we
are not in a position to judge between ethical conceptions (that is, systems of
moral principles) until we know a great deal about the substantive structure of
particular views — and much [more] than we know now’.108
Finally, Rawls’s holism led him to treat ethical theories as heuristic guides,
rather than as formal decision procedures. He now argued that ethical princi-
ples do not provide a formal model that applies to all cases. They serve only as
guides for identifying relevant reasons in any given case. They tell people
what to look for. Already, by the early 1960s, Rawls concluded that a concep-
tion of justice was a guide to intuitions:
At best [the principles] can set out the kinds of considerations to be taken
into account and go some of the way to provide a framework for balancing
them. But a conception of justice still requires the exercise of some judg-
ment at least particularly in these sort of cases.109
By 1970, Rawls had begun explicitly to distinguish between, on one hand, the
kind of ‘guiding framework’ he offered and, on the other, ethical theories that
purported to act as deductive systems. He rejected deductive systems of the
sort then being offered by Kurt Baier and R.M. Hare, arguing that we could
not discover ethical principles capable of serving as the major premises of our
moral judgments.110 Instead, he thought of ethical principles as a framework
of criteria for ‘identifying the morally relevant considerations and . . . guiding

107 Ibid., pp. 1ii–2i.

108 Ibid., p. 1i.
109 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture I: Nature and Limits of Political Philosophy (Fall 1966)’, in
J. Rawls, ‘Philosophy 171. Lects I–IV 1966’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard Uni-
versity Archives, HUM 48 Box 36, Folder 10 (1966), p. 2ii. See the early versions of this
argument in J. Rawls, ‘Nature of Political and Social Thought and Methodology’, The
Papers of John Rawls, Harvard University Archives, HUM 48 Box 35, Folder 10 (1960),
pp. 2ii–3i.
110 J. Rawls, ‘Lecture VI: Morality as a Guiding Framework’, in J. Rawls, ‘Phil 169
(Fall 1970) Lects IX–XIV. Theory of Value’, The Papers of John Rawls, Harvard Uni-
versity Archives, HUM 48 Box 5, Folder 12 (1970), p. 1i; K. Baier, The Moral Point of
View (Ithaca, 1958); R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford, 1952).

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724 M. BEVIR & A. GALIŠANKA

our moral capacities to more limited and manageable questions’.111 For

Rawls, the principles of justice were a guiding framework to help adjudicate
between conflicting claims.112
So, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls provided, first, a framework for identify-
ing morally relevant considerations, and second, a set of priority rules to
guide us in ordering these considerations in cases in which they conflicted
with one another.113 He had come to believe that if his principles of justice and
his priority rules reduced disagreement, they did ‘all that one may reasonably
ask’.114 His entanglement with naturalism had led him to limit the ambition of,
but not entirely to reject, his original modernist project.

Conclusion
The availability of Rawls’s unpublished papers makes it possible to study in
some detail the path by which he reached the approach to political philosophy
found in his A Theory of Justice. The papers show that from very early on
Rawls conceived of his project in modernist and even positivist terms that
echoed the Vienna Circle and other contemporary approaches to the human
sciences and arts. Rawls thought of ethical theory as seeking to identify an
ahistorical syntax or structure — a set of formal principles — that was capable
of explaining atomized facts, empirical appearances, and in particular the
spontaneous judgments of reasonable men. Later, he drew on more post-
analytic themes from Wittgenstein and Quine to reconsider the basis and force
of any such modernist theory. However, while Rawls came to moderate the
claims he made on behalf of a theory of justice, he never renounced his basic,
modernist conception of ethical theory. He continued to seek formal princi-
ples that explained, and so were justified by, intuitive judgments.
Rawls’s papers thus show him to have been very much a philosopher of his
time. On one hand, these papers undermine any suggestion that his interest in
justice and social institutions was a response to the social and political events
of the 1960s; given that he outlined much of his project in the late 1940s, the
upheavals of the 1960s must appear of more limited significance. On the
other, however, Rawls’s papers locate him squarely in the modernist intellec-
tual culture of the inter-war and immediate post-war years; his commitment to
modernist theorizing and his attempts to incorporate post-analytic themes
were alike common among some of his contemporaries.
Placing Rawls among his contemporaries also makes more sense of the way
he understood himself. Rawls thought that A Theory of Justice transcended
the historical context in which it was written; he implied that his principles of

111 Rawls, ‘Lecture VI: Morality as a Guiding Framework’, p. 2i.

112 Ibid.
113 Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 53.
114 Ibid.

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 JOHN RAWLS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 725

justice applied to all times, he tried to justify the principles independently of

any historical narrative, and he suggested that he was continuing a canon of
moral and political philosophy the last contribution to which had been in the
nineteenth century.115 At the same time, however, Rawls described his own
project as the analysis of the considered judgments of reasonable men, and
often simply ‘our’ judgments. Placing Rawls in the logical positivist tradition
makes this combination of ahistoricism and contextualism intelligible. This
combination was typical of positivists such as Popper who laid their theories
on the foundation of basic judgments which were thought to be shared by the
majority of present and past scientific observers.
More controversially, we would suggest that Rawls’s approach reflects the
modernist rejection of nineteenth-century historicism in favour of more formal,
logical, syntactical or structural theorizing, but that Rawls’s self-understanding
is nonetheless misleading, since it hides the historical contingency of just this
modernism. It is, after all, one thing to be a modernist who is committed to
formal theories; it is entirely another thing to ignore the historical context of
one’s modernism.
Rawls’s persistent adherence to modernist forms of theorizing also helps to
explain aspects of the reception of A Theory of Justice. By the 1970s, the
decline of modernism and the rise of post-analytic themes were encouraging
some philosophers to look again at idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics
and pragmatism. Philosophers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard
Rorty, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams expressed their admiration for
Rawls’s achievement while complaining about his ahistorical approach. When
these philosophers drew on post-analytic themes, they tried, not to naturalize
modernism, but to liberate naturalist and historicist perspectives from their
earlier association with the idealist claim that historical development is
purposeful.
In today’s folk memories, Rawls often appears as either the slayer or the
guardian of a positivist analytic philosophy. Both views are in some respects
right, but they need to be nuanced. We would suggest that it is philosophically
as well as historically more fruitful to view him as a positivist making conces-
sions to post-analytic themes, but still seeking formal theories that would later
pitch him against various attempts to reintroduce historicism without its ear-
lier idealist teleology.

Mark Bevir & Andrius Gališanka UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

BERKELEY

115 Ibid., p. viii.

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