John Rawls 羅爾斯 · John Bordley Rawls

🔊His biographer Thomas Pogge calls the loss of the brothers the most important events of his childhood. It is hard not to connect them with the idea that runs through his work: that who lives and who dies, who is gifted and who is not, who is born into which house, are matters of luck for which no one can take credit or blame. Rawls rarely spoke of it.

他的傳記作者湯瑪斯・博格說，失去這兩個弟弟，是他童年最重要的事件。很難不把它們跟貫穿他著作的那個觀念連在一起：誰活、誰死，誰有天賦、誰沒有，誰生在哪一戶人家，都是運氣的事；沒有人能為此居功或受責。羅爾斯很少談起這件事。

🔊At Princeton he wrote an intensely religious senior thesis and thought of becoming an Episcopal priest. He graduated in 1943 and enlisted in the army. He served as an infantryman in New Guinea, where he was awarded the Bronze Star, and in the Philippines, where he saw heavy fighting. It was there that he lost his Christian faith. After Japan surrendered he was part of the occupying army and saw what was left of Hiroshima. He was promoted to sergeant. Then he refused an order to discipline a fellow soldier, because he believed that no punishment was justified, and he was demoted to private. He left the army in January 1946.

在普林斯頓，他寫了一篇宗教情感濃烈的畢業論文，並且考慮過成為聖公會的牧師。他 1943 年畢業，隨即入伍。他在新幾內亞當步兵，在那裡獲頒銅星勳章；又到菲律賓，在那裡見到了激烈的戰鬥。他就是在那裡失去了基督信仰。日本投降之後，他隨佔領軍進駐，見到了廣島剩下來的樣子。他被升為中士。後來他拒絕執行一項懲處同袍的命令，因為他認為沒有任何懲罰是正當的；他被降回二等兵。1946 年 1 月，他離開了軍隊。

🔊He went back to Princeton for a doctorate in moral philosophy, and married Margaret Fox in 1949. They had four children. A year at Oxford in 1952 brought him into contact with Isaiah Berlin and the legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart. Fifty years after the bombing, in one of the few pieces he wrote for a general audience, he argued that the destruction of Hiroshima had been a grave wrong.

他回到普林斯頓攻讀道德哲學的博士學位，並在 1949 年與瑪格麗特・福克斯結婚。他們有四個孩子。1952 年在牛津的一年，使他接觸到以撒・柏林與法哲學家哈特。原爆五十年後，在他為一般讀者寫的少數幾篇文章之一裡，他主張摧毀廣島是一個嚴重的錯誤。

🔊He taught at Cornell and at MIT, and in 1962 moved to Harvard, where he remained until he retired. In 1958 he had published a paper called “Justice as Fairness.” He spent the next thirteen years turning it into a book, circulating drafts among students and colleagues and rewriting in response. A Theory of Justice appeared in 1971. Its preface begins, “This is a long book, not only in pages.” At the time many philosophers believed that their subject could say nothing substantive about how society should be arranged. The book changed that. Nozick, who disagreed with nearly all of it, wrote that political philosophers must now either work within Rawls’s theory or explain why not.

他在康乃爾與麻省理工任教；1962 年轉到哈佛，在那裡一直待到退休。1958 年，他發表了一篇論文，題為〈作為公平的正義〉。接下來的十三年，他把它變成一本書：把草稿傳給學生與同事看，再根據回應重寫。《正義論》在 1971 年問世。它的序言開頭是：「這是一本很長的書，不只是頁數上。」當時許多哲學家相信，他們這門學問對於「社會應該怎麼安排」說不出任何實質的東西。這本書改變了這一點。幾乎完全不同意它的諾齊克寫道：政治哲學家現在要嘛在羅爾斯的理論之內工作，要嘛解釋為什麼不。

🔊Fame did not change his habits. He gave almost no interviews and described himself as having a horror of the limelight. Students remember a teacher who took careful notes on what they said and presented the philosophers he lectured on in their strongest form. In 1989 student protesters in Tiananmen Square held up copies of his book. In 1999 he received the National Humanities Medal. A series of strokes from 1995 slowed his work, and he died at home in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 2002, aged eighty-one.

名聲並沒有改變他的習慣。他幾乎不接受訪問，並且形容自己對鎂光燈有一種恐懼。學生記得的是這樣一位老師：他仔細記下他們說的話；講到哪一位哲學家，就以那位哲學家最強的形式來呈現。1989 年，天安門廣場上抗議的學生舉起了他的書。1999 年，他獲頒美國國家人文獎章。從 1995 年開始的一連串中風，拖慢了他的工作；2002 年，他在麻薩諸塞州萊辛頓的家中去世，享年八十一歲。