MATTHEW SCHERERever, Rawls did consent to undertake some form of autobiography. He authorized
Thomas Pogge, a former student and friend, to publish a biographical sketch based on a
series of conversations. Two vignettes from this biographical sketch suggest that the story
of Rawls’s life presents with dazzling clarity dimensions of the appeal that fashioning and
defending a theory of justice holds out:
John (Jack) Bordley Rawls was born on February 21, 1921, in Baltimore as the second
of five sons of William Lee and Anna Abell Rawls. The most important events in
Jack’s childhood were the losses of two younger brothers, who died of diseases con-
tracted from Jack. The first of these incidents occurred in 1928, when Jack fell gravely
ill. Although [his younger brother] Robert Lee (Bobby) had been sternly told not to
enter Jack’s room, he did so anyway a few times to keep Jack company. Soon both
children were lying in bed with high fever. The correct diagnosis and antitoxin came
too late to save Bobby. His death was a severe shock to Jack and may have (as their
mother thought) triggered his stammer, which has been a serious, though gradually
receding, handicap for him ever since that time. Jack recovered from the diptheria,
but the very next winter caught a severe pneumonia, which soon infected his brother
Thomas Hamilton (Tommy). The tragedy of the previous year repeated itself. While
Jack was recovering slowly, his little brother died in February of 1929.Rawls proceeded to teach in the Harvard Philosophy Department from 1962 until his
retirement in 1991. Rawls was an unusual person among the self-confident divinities
of the Harvard Philosophy Department. With his caring interactions with students
and visitors, his modesty, his insecurity and conciliatory attitude in discussions, one
could have taken him for a visiting professor from the countryside next to his famous
and overwhelmingly brilliant colleagues Quine, Goodman, Putnam, Nozick, Dreben,
and Cavell. Rawls has always found it difficult to function in larger groups, especially
with strangers, and even more so when he himself is the center of attention. On
such occasions he may seem shy or ill at ease and is sometimes still bothered by his
stammer.^55This is delicate ground, ground that some will want to avoid, much as, after his death,
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s friends and followers sought to avoid questions about his apparent
homosexuality for fear that discussion of what was then seen as an acutely embarrassing
subject could only diminish the importance, and impede the proper reception, of his
work. But if we take seriously the idea that the force of Rawls’s project is constituted
largely by its capacity to bring the desire for justice into circulation by rhetorical means,
and the idea that political argument more generally is continuously informed by similar
circuits of thought and feeling, the very real grounds of personal fault, regret, guilt, shame,
envy, and resentment are ones it would be best not to avoid. The most remarkable feature
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