John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. His best known work was his 1971 book A Theory of Justice in which he advanced his theory of justice as fairness. In this way he sought to reconcile the competing claims of liberty and equality. He spent most of his academic career as a professor at Harvard University.

As a young man, Rawls had been very religious. While an undergraduate at Princeton he seriously contemplated entering the Episcopal priesthood. His religious concerns were reflected in his senior thesis, "Meaning of Sin and Faith", which was an attack on Pelagianism because it "would render the Cross of Christ to no effect." After graduating from Princeton in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, he enlisted in the US Army, where he served as an infantryman in the Pacific theater. It was while serving during the war that he came to lose his religious faith and became an atheist.