The aim of this paper is to critically examine Rawls’ discussions of themethod of a moral theoryspread through his book ATheory of Justice. First, Kant’s reasons for rejecting the attempt to employ inphilosophy a method inspired in mathematics, respectively, in geometry are considered. This provides a basis forrejecting the interpretation given by Maria Carolina and Zeljko Loparic, according to which Rawls would haveallegedly followed Kant’s indications, and applied methodological developments of the Greek geometry to thesolution of philosophical problems. Second, a brief analysis of some passages in Rawls’ book is given fromwhich it becomes clear that despite his references to several methodological guidelines his real inspiration comesfrom Chomsky’s linguistics. The aims and method of Chomsky’s linguistics is then discussed to show theparallelism between them and Rawls’ own statements on the aims and method of his moral theory. Finally, it isargued that the purported parallelism collapses because, among other things, the data of a philosophical moraltheory are completely different in nature from the data in linguistics.
