www.iht.com/articles/78308.html " NEW YORK John Rawls, 82, the American political theorist whose work gave new meaning and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism, died Sunday at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. . His wife, Margaret, said he had been incapacitated since suffering a stroke in 1995. . The publication of Rawls's book "A Theory of Justice" in 1971 was perceived as a watershed moment in modern philosophy and came at a time of furious national debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for racial equality. Not only did it veer from the main current of philosophical thought, which was logic and linguistic analysis, it also stimulated a revival of attention to moral philosophy. Rawls made a sophisticated argument for a new concept of justice, based on simple fairness. . Before Rawls, the concept of utilitarianism, meaning that a society ought to work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, held sway as the standard for social justice. He wrote that this approach could ride roughshod over the rights of minorities and meant that the liberty of an individual was of only secondary importance compared with the majority's interests. . His new theory began with two principles. The first was that each individual has a right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with the same liberty for others. The second was that social and economic inequalities are just only to the extent that they serve to promote the well-being of the least advantaged. . But how could people agree to structure a society in accordance with these two principles? Rawls's response was to revive the concept of the social contract developed earlier by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. . For people to make the necessary decisions to arrive at the social contract, Rawls introduced the concept of a "veil of ignorance." This meant that each person must select rules to live by without knowing whether he would be prosperous or destitute in the society governed by the rules he chose. He called this the "original position." . An individual in the "original position" would choose the society in which the worst possible position - which, for all he knows, would be his - was better than the worst possible position in any other system. The result, Rawls argued, was that the least fortunate would be best protected. The lowest rung of society would be higher. Though inequalities would not be abolished by favoring the neediest, they would be minimized, he argued. In later works, Rawls expanded his arguments to suggest how a pluralistic society could be just to all its members. His idea was that the public could reason things out, provided that comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines are avoided. Like Kant, whom he revered, Rawls believed that as liberal democracies capable of such reasonableness spread, wars would be avoided. . Eugene Rostow, 89, led agency on arms control in Reagan era . WASHINGTON:Eugene Rostow, 89, a legal scholar who helped create Yale Law School's current eminence and became a vigorous defender of the Vietnam War as a senior State Department official, died Monday at an assisted-living residence in Alexandria, Virginia. . Like his more famous younger brother, Walt, who was President Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser and an architect of the administration's Vietnam strategy, Rostow, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs, was part of a generation of hawkish Democrats. Deeply influenced by World War II, they saw fighting communism in Southeast Asia as central to a policy of global containment. . The Brooklyn-born son of a Socialist, who named him for the party's presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, Rostow exemplified the strain of hard-headed Democratic thinking on foreign policy and defense that flowered in the 1960s. He ended his public career as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan administration. He was also an affable and erudite scholar, with a taste for bow ties and vests, fine food and wine, who as dean of Yale Law School from 1955 to 1965 built up its endowment. He was renowned for recruiting more than a dozen top legal scholars in 1956, during a period of turmoil at the school over the lack of promotions for faculty members who had clerked for liberal justices.(NYT) "
__________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
