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The "veil of ignorance" is a method of determining the morality of issues. It asks a decision-maker to make a choice about a social or moral issue and assumes that they have enough information to know.
Table of contents

In the complete absence of probabilities, Rawls thinks you should play it safe and maximise the minimum you could get a policy he calls Maximin. Translated into a society, that means that we should ensure that the worst-off people in society do as well as possible. First Principle: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties , compatible with the same liberties for all;. Rawls opts for equality of basic liberties in the First Principle because he thinks this is essential for seeing yourself as a moral equal in society. For other Primary Goods, though, equality is less important.

By allowing some inequality, we could make life better for everyone.

The stability of bargains behind the veil of ignorance | SpringerLink

If we attach higher salaries to certain jobs, they may attract the hardest working people, producing greater economic benefits for everyone. Fair equality of opportunity says that positions which bring unequal payoffs must be open to people of equal talents and equal willingness to use them on an equal basis. If two people are just as capable of doing a job, and just as hardworking and willing to apply themselves, neither should have a greater chance of securing the position because they are wealthier, or because of their race or religion. Of course, we might wonder and Rawls does not give a clear answer about this when we are supposed to judge whether two people are equally hardworking and talented.

The talents you choose to develop, and the amount of effort you put in, are heavily affected by education; so it might seem unfair to judge people if they have had very different educational experiences. Finally, the Difference Principle sets a further restriction on inequalities.

Even if a particular inequality does not affect equality of opportunities, the Difference Principle tells us that it must be beneficial for the very worst off. For instance, it might be that by allowing inequalities, we motivate people to work harder, generating more Primary Goods overall. If these then benefit the worst off in society, making them better off than they would have been in a more equal distribution, the Difference Principle will allow that inequality. As with any influential philosopher, Rawls has been the subject of much criticism and disagreement.

We have already noted that Rawls explicitly makes several assumptions that shape the nature of the discussion behind the Veil of Ignorance, and the outcomes that are likely to come out of it. However, one might challenge Rawls by disputing the fairness or intuitiveness of one or more of his assumptions.

Original Position

One problem with this argument, to which Rawls might appeal, is that my ability to work and therefore gain property depends on many other things: my education, my health that was guaranteed by a public health system, a stable society that affords me opportunities for employment, or for employing others. A second criticism also concerns the fact that, behind the Veil, various facts are hidden from you. Rather than worrying about the substantive conclusions Rawls reaches, as Nozick does, this criticism worries about the very coherence of reasoned discussion behind the Veil of Ignorance.

Since one of the facts that is hidden by the veil is the nature of the society you live in, we may assume that the resulting principles are supposed to be applicable in all societies, though this is a view that Rawls attempted to reject in later work. In addition, people behind the Veil are supposed to come up with a view of how society should be structured while knowing almost nothing about themselves, and their lives. Even if Rawls is right that people behind the Veil would agree on his two principles, communitarians think that the hypothetical agreement ignores much that is important.

Certainly, it is a plausible worry that what justice requires may depend in part on the values of the society in question. John Rawls Introduction John Rawls's Enduring Innovations The Veil of Ignorance Taught By.

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Luce Director. Try the Course for Free. Explore our Catalog Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers. Get Started. No stable, enduring society could exist without certain rules of property, contract, and transfer of goods and resources, for they make economic production, trade, and consumption possible. Nor could a society long endure without some political mechanism for resolving disputes and making, revising, interpreting, and enforcing its economic and other cooperative norms; nor without some form of the family, to reproduce, sustain, and nurture members of its future generations.

Even if certain religions have been ideologically necessary to sustain the norms of particular societies, many societies can and do exist without the involvement or support of religious institutions. Instead moral persons are persons who are capable of being rational since they have the capacities to form, revise and pursue a conception of the good; moreover, moral persons also are capable of being reasonable since they have a moral capacity for a sense of justice—to cooperate with others on terms that are fair and to understand, apply, and act upon principles of justice and their requirements.

Otherwise our conduct is coerced for reasons we cannot reasonably or rationally accept and we are not fundamentally free persons. Starting from these assumptions, Rawls construes the moral point of view from which to decide moral principles of justice as a social contract in which representatives of free and equal persons are given the task of coming to an agreement on principles of justice that are to regulate their social and political relations in perpetuity. How otherwise, Rawls contends, should we represent the justification of principles of justice for free and equal persons who have different conceptions of their good, as well as different religious, philosophical, and moral views?

There is no commonly accepted moral or religious authority or doctrine to which they could appeal in order to discover principles of justice that all could agree to and accept. Rawls contends that, since his aim is to discover a conception of justice appropriate for a democratic society, it should be justifiable to free and equal persons in their capacity as citizens on terms which all can endorse and accept.

The role of the social contract is to represent this idea, that the basic principles of social cooperation are justifiable hence acceptable to all members of society, and that they are principles which all can commit themselves to support and comply with. How is this social contract to be conceived? Rawls maintains in LHPP, cf. Hobbes and Locke thus posited a hypothetical state of nature in which there is no political authority, and where people are regarded as rational and for Locke also reasonable.

The presumption is that if a government could or would be agreed to by all rational persons subject to it in an appropriately described pre-political situation, then it is acceptable to rational persons generally, including you and me, and hence is legitimate and is the source of our political obligations. Thus Hobbes argues that all rational persons in a state of nature would agree to authorize an absolute sovereign, while Locke comes to the opposite conclusion, contending that absolutism would be rejected in favor of constitutional monarchy.

Similarly, in Rousseau and Kant, the social contract is a way to reason about the General Will, or the laws that hypothetical moral agents would all agree to in order to promote the common good and realize the freedom and equality of citizens. Rawls employs the idea of a hypothetical social contract for more general purposes than his predecessors. He aims to provide principles of justice that can be applied to determine not only the justice of political constitutions and the laws, but also the justice of the institution of property and of social and economic arrangements for the production and distribution of income and wealth, as well as the distribution of educational and work opportunities, and of powers and positions of office and responsibility.

Some have objected that hypothetical agreements cannot bind or obligate people; only actual contracts or agreements can impose obligations and commitments Dworkin, , ff. Its point rather is to help discover and explicate the requirements of our moral concepts of justice and enable us to draw the consequences of considered moral convictions of justice that we all presumably share. Whether we in turn consciously accept or agree to these consequences and the principles and duties they implicate once brought to our awareness is irrelevant to their justification.

The point rather of conjecturing the outcome of a hypothetical agreement is that, assuming that the premises underlying the original position correctly represent our most deeply held considered moral convictions and concepts of justice, then we are committed to endorsing the resulting principles and duties whether or not we actually accept or agree to them. Not to do so implies a failure to accept and live up to the consequences of our own moral convictions about justice.

He assumes that if the parties to the social contract are fairly situated and take all relevant information into account, then the principles they would agree to are also fair. The fairness of the original agreement situation transfers to the principles everyone agrees to; furthermore, whatever laws or institutions are required by the principles of justice are also fair. There are different ways to define a fair agreement situation depending on the purpose of the agreement and the description of the parties to it.

What is a fair agreement situation among free and equal persons when the purpose of the agreement is fundamental principles of justice for the basic structure of society? What sort of facts should the parties to such a fundamental social contract know, and what sort of facts are irrelevant or even prejudicial to a fair agreement? Given this knowledge, Locke assumes that, while starting from a position of equal political right, the great majority of free and equal persons in a state of nature — including all women and racial minorities, and all other men who do not meet a rigid property qualification — could and most likely would rationally agree to alienate their natural rights of equal political jurisdiction in order to gain the benefits of political society.

Thus Locke envisions as legitimate a constitutional monarchy that is in effect a gender-and-racially biased class state, a state wherein a small class of amply propertied white males exercise political rights to vote, hold office, exercise political and social influence, and enjoy other important benefits and responsibilities to the exclusion of everyone else see Rawls, LHPP, — The problem with this arrangement, of course, is that gender and racial classifications, social class, wealth and lack thereof, are, like absence of religious belief, not good reasons for depriving people of their equal political rights or opportunities to occupy social and political positions.

Knowledge of these and other facts are not morally relevant for deciding who should qualify to vote, hold office, and actively participate in governing and administering society. The remedy for such biases of judgment is to redefine the initial situation. Rather than a state of nature Rawls situates the parties to his social contract so that they do not have access to factual knowledge that can distort their judgments and result in unfair principles. Among the essential features of the original position is that no one knows his or her place in society, class position or social status, nor does any one know his or her race or gender, fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, level of intelligence, strength, education, and the like.

This veil of ignorance deprives the parties of all knowledge of particular facts about themselves, about one another, and even about their society and its history. The parties are not however completely ignorant of facts. They know all kinds of general facts about persons and societies, including knowledge of relatively uncontroversial scientific laws and generalizations accepted within the natural and social sciences — economics, psychology, political science, biology and other natural sciences including applications of Darwinian evolutionary theory that are generally accepted by scientists, however controversial they may be among religious fundamentalists.

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They know then about the general tendencies of human behavior and psychological development, about neuropsychology and biological evolution, and about how economic markets work, including neo-classical price theory of supply and demand. Rawls thinks that since the parties are required to come to an agreement on objective principles that supply universal standards of justice applying across all societies, knowledge of particular and historical facts about any person or society is morally irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to their decision.

The parties in the original position do not know any particular facts about themselves or society; they all have the same general information made available to them.


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A thick veil of ignorance thus is designed to represent the equality of persons purely as moral persons, and not in any other contingent capacity or social role. In this regard the veil interprets the Kantian idea of equality as equal respect for moral persons cf.

CP Among the most frequent is that choice in the original position is indeterminate Sen, , 11—12, 56— Among other reasons for this, it is said that the parties are deprived of so much information about themselves that they are psychologically incapable of making a choice, or they are incapable of making a rational choice. For how can we make any rational choice without knowing our primary ends, or fundamental values and commitments?

MacIntyre, ; Sandel One answer is that we do not need to know everything about ourselves, including our primary purposes, to make rational decisions about the background social conditions needed to pursue those primary purposes. To the objection that choice behind the veil of ignorance is psychologically impossible, Rawls says that it is important not to get too caught up in the theoretical fiction of the original position, as if it were some historical event among real people who are being asked to do something impossible.

The Veil Of Ignorance

They represent an ideal of free and equal reasonable and rational moral persons that Rawls assumes is implicit in our reasoning about justice. Many different kinds of reasons and facts are not morally relevant to that kind of decision e. As a mathematician, scientist, or musician exercise their expertise by ignoring their knowledge of particular facts about themselves, presumably we can do so too in reasoning about principles of justice.

For justice consists, allegedly, of the measures that effectively promote good consequences. Without knowledge what is ultimately good however that is to be defined the parties cannot discover the principles of justice that best promote it. Impartiality is achieved by depriving the impartial observer or rational chooser of any knowledge of its own identity.

For Rawls, a primary reason for a thick veil of ignorance is to enable an unbiased assessment of the justice of existing social and political institutions and of existing desires, preferences and conceptions of the good. The principles agreed to would then not be sufficiently detached from the very desires, circumstances, and institutions these principles are to critically assess. To take an obvious counterexample, there is little if any justice in laws approved from a utilitarian impartial perspective when these laws take into account racially prejudiced preferences which are cultivated by grossly unequal, racially discriminatory and segregated social conditions.