The Importance of Philosophy: Reflections on John Rawls Joshua Cohen In spring 1974, I was 22 years old, and a first-year graduate student in the Harvard Philosophy department. One of my courses that term was a seminar on Kant’s moral philosophy with John Rawls. The class met on Wednesdays. And one Wednesday evening, after returning home from a meeting of the seminar, I had a phone call from Jack (everyone called him Jack). He was calling, he said, because he was concerned about how the seminar had gone that day. I don’t recall the precise words, but knowing Jack, I am sure that he did not ask whether it had gone well: he would have said something like “I hope it seemed OK to you.” I told him that it had indeed gone fine: of course, I thought the class was great, but didn’t want to embarrass him by saying that. I was pleased to get the call. When you are 22, it is nice to have your judgment taken that seriously by someone you hold in the highest regard. But Jack didn’t call to be pleasing or affirming. He called because he really wanted to know whether the seminar had been okay: at least I think that’s why he called. He seemed genuinely worried about whether he had been understood. I was a little taken aback by his concern. But that intense worry was entirely characteristic: so it eventually seemed to me, over the years, and from observing him in a wide range of settings with lots of different people.I believe that John Rawls’s deep concerns about being understood owed ultimately to his sense of the profound importance of his subject-matter. Not the importance of his own contribution—though for all his famous modesty, he knew he had done something pretty significant, and taught A Theory of Justice in his political philosophy course, along with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Mill. But the concern was driven, instead, by a profound sense of responsibility to his topic. And that topic was morality—personal morality on that Wednesday in 1974, political morality in much of his published work. It was as if he felt that there was nothing worse than failing to do justice to this subject-matter—or even if wasn’t the worst thing, it was really bad. And why was it so important? The best way to answer to that question is to sketch the principal ideas in Rawls’s work. In A Theory of Justice (1971, 1999), John Rawls proposed a striking and original marriage of liberty and equality, animated by a tolerant and democratic faith in human possibilities. For much of the past century, the idea of a political philosophy devoted to both liberty and equality seemed to many people a contradiction in terms. Outraged by vast differences between the lives of rich and poor, egalitarians condemned the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith for giving undue attention to legal rights and liberties, while remaining indifferent to the fate of ordinary people. Traditional liberalism, they complained, prized equality before the law, but showed complacency in the face of profound and grim inequalities of fortune on earth.Classical liberals, in contrast, embraced personal liberty, and condemned egalitarians for their paternalism and willingness to sacrifice human freedom in the name of some possible future utopia. Practically speaking, democratic welfare states tried, with more or less success, to ensure personal and political liberties while protecting individuals from unforgiving markets. But the philosophical options seemed starkly opposed. In between Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism and Karl Marx’s egalitarianism, everything was an unstable political compromise, or an ad hoc balancing of competing values. A Theory of Justice changed all this. Rawls proposed a conception of justice—he called it ”justice as fairness”—that was committed to both the individual rights we associate with classical liberalism, and to an egalitarian ideal of fair distribution conventionally associated with socialist and radical democratic traditions. Justice as fairness, Rawls said, aims to effect a "reconciliation of liberty and equality." His work prompted a remarkable renaissance of political philosophy in the United States and elsewhere (A Theory of Justice has been translated into more than 20 languages), and has provided the foundation for all subsequent discussion about fundamental questions of social justice. Rawls’s proposed reconciliation of liberty and equality is expressed in his two principles of justice. According to the first principle—of equal basic liberties—each citizen has a right to the most extensive system of equal basic personal and political liberties compatible with a similar system of liberties for others. Covering both the liberties of the ancients and of the moderns, this principle requires stringent protections for freedom of thought and conscience;rights to participate in politics; freedom of association; and the rights associated with due process of law. These liberties, Rawls argues, have special priority and are not to be restricted in the name of the community’s overall good. Rawls's first principle also includes a demanding norm of political equality, which condemns inequalities in opportunities for political influence. Thus citizens with the motivation and ability to play an active political role should not be disadvantaged by a lack of personal wealth. Rawls's second principle of justice restricts the extent of social and economic inequalities. It requires, first, that jobs and positions of responsibility—which often carry unequal rewards—must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. Fair equality demands that people who are equally talented and motivated must have equal chances to attain desirable positions, regardless of their social background. Access to well-compensated, rewarding work should not depend on the circumstances in which people happen to have been raised. But even a society that achieves fair equality of opportunity might still have troubling economic inequalities. Suppose, for example, that some people, partly because of their native endowments, possess scarce talents that command high returns in the market, while others lack such skills. Assume people in both groups work hard, and contribute as best they can. Still, they will reap substantially different rewards, and those differences will have a large impact on their lives. The problem is that these inequalities of reward are