Rawls, Genealogy, History

Abstract

In the spring of 1969, two years prior to the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), the American philosopher John Rawls studied just war theory and taught a course devoted partially to the topic. He taught this class three decades prior to the publication of The Law of Peoples (1999), his book-length engagement with questions of international order and global difference. Rawls’s notes for this class—Philosophy 173, Moral Problems: Nations &War—are from what’s often described as his “middle period.” The Rawls Papers preserve a number of folders devoted to this class; included in them are drafts of Rawls’s lectures, two drafts of his syllabus, his annotated bibliographies, and others’ syllabi. Katrina Forrester’smasterful critical history, In the Shadowof Justice (2019), helpfully situates this class against the backdrop of theVietnamWar and draft refusal; the lectures tried to carve out a space beyondmoral absolutism and statist realism. Although Rawls did not publish this work, it is evidence of how certain events and relations presented themselves as moral questions