Two Concepts of Rules John Rawls The Philosophical Review, 1955 Imagine you're playing a game of baseball. Baseball has rules: you get three strikes before you're out, and if you hit a home run, you run around the bases and score. These rules aren't just helpful suggestions - they define what baseball is. Without them, you're not playing baseball at all; you're just a bunch of people standing around with bats and balls, doing random things. Just as baseball is defined by its rules, many of our most important social and legal institutions are defined by theirs. John Rawls' essay, "Two Concepts of Rules," explores this idea in depth. He seeks to explain the difference between two types of justifications: one for the rules of a practice as a whole and another for individual actions that fall under those rules. Rawls begins with the example of punishment. Suppose a man named Jack robs a bank and gets sent to prison. If you ask, "Why was Jack put in prison?" the answer is straightforward: Because he committed a crime, was found guilty in a trial, and the law says that bank robbers should be punished. The answer to this question focuses on Jack's actions and how they violated existing rules. But suppose you asked a different question: "Why do we have laws that send people to prison for robbery in the first place?" The answer here is different and broader: These laws exist to protect society, to deter others from committing similar crimes, and to maintain social order. What Rawls is emphasizing is that these are fundamentally different kinds of questions. The first question is backward-looking, focusing on what Jack did in the past. The second is forward-looking, considering the future effects of having certain laws. This distinction helps us understand two competing views of punishment: the retributive view, which says people deserve punishment because they've done wrong, and the utilitarian view, which justifies punishment based on the future benefits it brings to society, like deterring crime. Rawls asserts that these two views don't have to be enemies. Instead, they apply to different roles within our society. Legislators, who create laws, should think like utilitarians: they should consider what rules will lead to the best outcomes for everyone. Judges, on the other hand, are bound to follow the retributive perspective because their job is to apply the rules to specific cases. Just like a baseball umpire has to call a "strike" even if it seems unfair in a given moment, a judge can't bend the rules every time they feel it might do more good. And this is just the beginning of Rawls' analysis of rules and their role in society.