At age seven, John Rawls survived diphtheria, but his brother Bobby caught it from him and died. The next winter Rawls survived pneumonia and his brother Tommy died the same way. This episode argues that the survivor's guilt from those losses, along with a stutter he carried for life, drove a man who would dedicate himself to the mechanics of fairness. It follows Rawls from a Baltimore childhood shaped by a suffragist mother, through an intensely religious period at Princeton, to infantry combat in the Pacific, the aftermath of Hiroshima, a refused order and demotion, and the collapse of his Christian faith.

From there the conversation unpacks the reclusive Harvard professor's major works. A Theory of Justice in 1971 introduced the original position and the veil of ignorance, explained here through cutting a cake without knowing which slice ...