"Rawls’ young life was marred by a double tragedy. When he was seven he contracted diphtheria, and when a younger brother Bobby visited him in hospital the disease was passed on and Bobby died. Then, two years later, the tragedy was repeated when Rawls developed pneumonia and passed it on to his other young brother, who also died. The irrational conviction that he was somehow responsible for their deaths haunted the youngster for many years.

After primary school in Baltimore, Rawls attended Kent School in Connecticut. Entering Princeton University in 1939 he graduated BA summa cum laude in 1943, then enlisted in the US Army as an infantryman. While at university, Rawls had been intensely religious, writing a deeply religious thesis, and he considered becoming an Episcopalian priest. But the horrors he experienced in prolonged and bloody combat as a foot soldier, where he saw the random capriciousness of death and the effects of war on his comrades, made him abandon his Christian faith. The further horrors of the Holocaust and later the Vietnam War led him to analyse the political systems in which such catastrophic events could occur. He asked himself the fundamental questions: How could democratically elected governments ruthlessly pursue unjust wars? And how could citizens resist their governments’ aggressive policies? Seeking answers to these questions set the course of his future life.

When Japan surrendered at the end of WWII, Rawls was promoted to sergeant and became part of the occupying army. On refusing to unfairly discipline a fellow soldier, he was demoted to private. Severely disenchanted, he left military service in 1946 to pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy at Princeton''.

"Rawls had a severe stutter, and this, combined with what one contemporary called “a bat-like horror of the limelight” ensured that he seldom gave interviews or accepted awards. So despite his immense contributions he never became a public intellectual. But his unswerving analysis of social institutions based on a concept of fairness has shown that science has no monopoly in shaping our future. Rawls demonstrated how a broad, more inclusive approach to the human predicament can be developed on a basis of mutual understanding, reasonableness, tolerance, through creating societies of free citizens who hold basic rights, and who, despite widely differing views, could cooperate within an egalitarian economic system''.

 MacFarlane