Design a fair society without knowing who you'll be in it.
Imagine choosing the rules of your society before you know whether you'll be born rich or poor, healthy or ill, or what you'll believe. John Rawls called this the veil of ignorance. It's one of the most influential thought experiments in modern political philosophy, and one of the most argued over.
The American philosopher John Rawls set out the idea in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. He asked us to picture an 'original position' in which people agree on the basic principles of their society from behind a veil of ignorance. They don't know their social status, gender, ethnicity or talents, nor even their own ideas of what makes a good life. Because no one can tilt the rules in their own favour, whatever they agreed would be fair.
The device plays the role that the 'state of nature' played for Hobbes and Locke, a starting point from which a social contract can be reasoned out. Rawls argued that people behind the veil would pick two principles. First, everyone gets the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are acceptable only if positions are open to all and the inequalities benefit the least advantaged, which he called the difference principle. His reasoning relied on a cautious decision rule, 'maximin', which judges options by how the worst-off position fares.
Rawls coined the terms, but the idea had forerunners. Adam Smith's impartial spectator and the social contract thinking of Kant and Mill point in a similar direction. The economists William Vickrey and John Harsanyi had already described much the same thought experiment and concluded something different: a rational chooser weighing expected outcomes, rather than fearing the worst, would favour maximising average well-being.
Critics pressed from several sides. Robert Nozick argued in 1974 that maximin is risk aversion taken to an extreme, and that fair starting points followed by free exchange can produce just outcomes without redistribution. Michael Sandel questioned whether anyone could really set aside all their convictions, as the veil requires. Yet even critics use the tool. Asking 'would I accept this rule if I didn't know where I'd stand?' remains a powerful test of fairness.
Source: Wikipedia — Original position · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
