When Rawls Met Jesus

How the philosopher’s early religious beliefs guided his secular thinking.

John Rawls was one of the greatest and most influential political philosophers of the last century. At a time when political philosophy was dominated by utilitarians on the one hand and Marxists on the other, he created a new way of thinking about fundamental questions of justice. In so doing he revived both the field of political philosophy and the idea that it was possible to do interesting work in moral philosophy not just by analyzing terms, but by constructing a substantive theory.

The main question Rawls tried to answer was: How can you tell whether the most basic institutions of a society are just? By what principles should you assess them? He was not concerned with assessing individual actions, or with justifying ad hoc redistributions, but with the institutions that structure our lives: the Constitution, the family, the market.

Rawls’s famous answer is that a just system is one that would be chosen by people in an imaginary situation that he calls the “Original Position.” In the Original Position, people know all sorts of general facts about the world: science, economics, psychology and so forth. However, they do not know any particular facts about themselves: their race, their gender, their talents, or their religion and values. They could be anyone.

The parties to the Original Position know that they have some conception of the kind of life they want to lead, and they want to ensure that they are in a position to lead it. But they do not know what it is. They do know, however, that there are some things that are generally useful for almost any plan of life: liberty, opportunity, income and wealth, and what Rawls calls “the social bases of self-respect.” To make sure that they will be able to live the lives they want to live, they would therefore try to choose principles that ensure that whoever they turn out to be, they will have those things. Rawls argues that they would first protect their basic liberties, then ensure genuine equality of opportunity, and finally allow any further inequalities only if the least well-off members of society would be better off with those inequalities than without them.

Since the Original Position is wholly imaginary, why should we care what people would choose if they were in it? For Rawls, the point is “simply to make vivid to ourselves the restrictions that it seems reasonable to impose on arguments for principles of justice, and therefore on these principles themselves.” If I accept some principle of justice only because of facts about my gender, my profession, my talents, and so forth, then I have no good reasons for accepting it at all. By excluding knowledge of these facts from the Original Position, Rawls ensures that facts that we do not regard as reasons for choosing one principle over another play no role in our decision.

Many people would agree that we should not accept some principle of justice only because it would give advantages to people with our particular constellation of talents or to people of our race or gender. But is religion a different matter? Why should, say, Catholics or Muslims base their views of justice on an imaginary contract that requires that they choose as if they did not know that God exists, or what he thinks justice requires?

Rawls has an answer to this question: It is precisely because religion matters so much to us that the parties to the Original Position choose to protect their religious freedom. If you know that you might hold some religious view, and that if you do, you will probably take it seriously, then you cannot afford to gamble with your freedom to practice it. If you knew that you would be part of a religious majority, then you might be tempted to structure your society in accordance with the dictates of your religion. But because you do not know what religion (if any) you follow, or how many others share your views, you will not want to risk not being able to live by your faith. Instead, you will choose principles that secure your (and everyone’s) freedom of religion.

Still, believers might wonder whether this reply does justice to their views. And since liberalism is often thought of as a secular philosophy, they might also wonder whether Rawls really understood how important religion is to a believer. A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith should answer that question once and for all.

The heart of the book is Rawls’s undergraduate thesis, written at a time when he was a very devout Episcopalian. In their introduction, Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel accurately describe Rawls’s thesis as “an extraordinary work for a 21-year-old, animated by youthful passion and powerful ethical conviction.” It is written in a much more personal style than Rawls’s later work. Rawls has found an idea that he thinks is very important; in his preface he writes that “we are proposing more or less of a ‘revolution.’” Reading it, one can feel the young Rawls strapping on the breastplate of truth and sallying forth to defend this idea, as well as his frustration when he feels he cannot do it justice. And while in his later work Rawls keeps his own religious views to himself, in the thesis he wears them on his sleeve. He begins by stating his presuppositions, the first of which is “that there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus.”

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