Word.ws English Dictionary

Rawlsian

Rawlsian adjective: of, relating to, or influenced by John Rawls (1921–2002), American moral and political philosopher.

Adjective

Rawlsian (comparative more Rawlsian, superlative most Rawlsian)

  1. Of, relating to, or influenced by John Rawls (1921–2002), American moral and political philosopher.
    • People differ on whether they care about fairness at all, and when they do care about fairness the notion of fairness they employ differes widely, ranging from Rawlsian (Leontief) to Utilitarian (perfect substitutes).2002, James Andreoni and John Miller, “Giving according to GARP”, in Econometrica, volume 70, number 2, page 745
    • From behind the Rawlsian veil, consumption and leisure interact with mortality to determine expected utility.2016, Charles I. Jones, Peter J. Klenow, “Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time”, in American Economic Review, volume 106, number 9, →DOI, page 2435 of 2426--2457

Noun

Rawlsian (plural Rawlsians)

  1. A follower of the theories of John Rawls.

Forms of Rawlsian

Adjective
comparativemore Rawlsian
superlativemost Rawlsian
Noun
pluralRawlsians

Origin of Rawlsian

From Rawls + -ian.

Words formed from Rawlsian

Questions about Rawlsian

What does Rawlsian mean?
Rawlsian means of, relating to, or influenced by John Rawls (1921–2002), American moral and political philosopher.
What part of speech is Rawlsian?
Rawlsian can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near Rawlsian in the dictionary

  1. Rawlins
  2. Rawlins County
  3. Rawlinson
  4. Rawls
  5. Rawlses
  6. Rawlsian
  7. Rawlsianism
  8. Rawlsians
  9. rawly
  10. Rawmarsh
  11. rawmix

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Rawlsian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Rawlsian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rawlsian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.