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JOHN RAWLS, who died last November at the age of 81, was the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century, and he was responsible for the revival of serious philosophical thought about concrete social questions over the past 40 years. Among the issues that have attracted sustained moral attention and argument is affirmative action, and in some sense the intellectual climate that Rawls produced has influenced this debate. But Rawls himself never wrote about the subject, and it is not easy to tell from his writings what his theory of justice would imply about it. I want to try to explain why this is so, and to explain how, nevertheless, his ideas have a beating on the issue.
The first thing to say is that Rawls concentrated for most of his life almost exclusively on what he called "ideal theory." By this he meant the theory of what would constitute a truly just society, and why. Ideal theory enables you to say when a society is unjust, because it falls short of the ideal. But it does not tell you what to do if, as is almost always the case, you find yourself in an unjust society, and want to correct that injustice. That is the province of what he called "nonideal theory." Affirmative action is clearly a policy intended to deal with the unjust consequences of an unjust history. Whether affirmative action is itself just or unjust is therefore a central question of nonideal theory for a society like ours.
In his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, Rawls discusses only two examples of nonideal theory: civil disobedience and conscientious objection to an unjust war. Both were important public issues during the 1960s, because of the civil rights movement and the...