Norman Daniels (b. 1942), currently Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard School of Public Health, is one of the philosophers who has done most to explore and enrich Rawls’s approach to social justice. Daniels was a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, although his own dissertation was not in moral or political philosophy, but concerned with Thomas Reid’s treatment of geometry, and was supervised not by Rawls but by Hilary Putnam. Over the course of his career, Daniels has stood in a number of relations to Rawls’s theory – from early critic, to extender and systematizer, through to acting as a defender of Rawls against a range of later critics.

Daniels edited the irst collection of critical articles on TJ, Reading Rawls (Daniels 1975), which brought together many of the most signiicant early discussions of Rawls’s theory, including pieces by Nagel, Dworkin, Hart, and Scanlon. Daniels’s own piece in this collection, “Equal Liberty and Unequal Worth of Liberty,” stands as one of themost interesting and powerful challenges to Rawls’s view from the left, and later earned a clarifying response from Rawls (PL 324–331; JF 148–152). Daniels has also been one of the leading defenders and developers of Rawls’s philosophical methodology of relective equilibrium (Daniels 1996).