Thought experiment 7: the Veil of Ignorance

Rawlsian social justice is the bedrock of contemporary liberalism.

Illustration by Marie Montocchio / Ikon Images

From the trauma of the Second World War there emerged some important works in political theory, including Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). But by 1971, when a modest, soft-spoken American, John Rawls, published A Theory of Justice, this branch of academia was considered by many political theorists to be more or less moribund.

Rawls had led a cloistered university existence, but he was shaped by two profound experiences: first, as a child, the death of two brothers, to whom he’d passed on illness, and second, combat as an infantryman in the Second World War. What he witnessed in war led him to abandon his hitherto deep Christian faith. Still, he approached his academic discipline with an almost spiritual seriousness.

A Theory of Justice, hundreds of pages of often technical and dense argumentation, is hardly a page-turner. But upon publication it was credited with pouring fuel on the discipline’s dying embers, and with reviving the notion that there was an implicit contract in democracies between the state and the individual – a tradition encompassing Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau. Rawls’ ambitious tome offers “a systematic theory of social justice for liberal democracies”, says the Cambridge philosopher Sarah Fine. The key thought experiment in Rawls’ theory is as follows. Suppose you are in what Rawls calls “the original position” behind “a Veil of Ignorance”. You don’t know if you’re healthy or sick, well off or less well off, black or white, male or female, old or young, straight or gay, a city or a country dweller, a lover of sports or the arts. You have no knowledge of your talents or lack thereof. From this position of ignorance, you are asked to select the principles of justice to regulate society, including those regulating the distribution of wealth and income.

Rawls believed that disputes about justice were often a result of bias, which is why investment bankers and social workers tend to disagree about the fair rate of tax. However, if we were unaware of the facts about ourselves that Rawls thought irrelevant for justice, then we would choose to adopt several principles that all reasonable citizens could endorse. We would want the maximum liberty and rights compatible with everyone else having the same. We would want everyone to have fair equality of opportunity. Most interesting of all, Rawls claims, we would only accept inequalities if they were to the greatest benefit of the least well off. Rawls called this “the Difference Principle”. Although huge disparities would be ruled out, some differences in, say, income may be permissible if they really are to the benefit of the least well off.

Some academics have accepted the set-up but have argued that the principles that people would adopt from behind the veil would not be those that Rawls himself proposed. After all, if people were entirely risk-neutral, they might favour a system that maximised overall wealth, or well-being, if on average in such a system, citizens would be better off. In other words, they might be willing to gamble that when the veil was lifted they were nearer the top than the bottom of the social heap. Rawls dismissed this possibility, however, because in such a world the liberties of a few citizens might be sacrificed for the benefit of others. A Theory of Justice is explicitly anti-utilitarian; fundamental to its conception of justice is the separateness of persons. The basic rights and liberties of each and every person matters, and rights can’t just be aggregated across society.

Feminist critics of Rawls have argued that his theory doesn’t take seriously enough the injustices within families. Others disagree with his starting point, asking why, as Fine puts it, “he privileges justice over other fundamental issues, such as security”.

Taking Rawls seriously would demand a radical shift in how society is governed. Citizens are conceived as free and equal, which is hardly compatible with a world in which an Elon Musk can spend millions of dollars to influence an election. Nor would it be plausible to justify the scale of Musk’s wealth with a patently ludicrous claim that it somehow benefits the poorest in the US.

Not many philosophers have their name adjectivised. But there are Rawlsians in universities around the world and it is inconceivable a course in political theory could exclude A Theory of Justice. The book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, several generations of students have been exposed to it, and its influence has seeped out beyond the academy. It has been quoted in the Supreme Court. During the Tiananmen Square unrest, protesters held the book aloft. Still, the election of Donald Trump is depressing confirmation that the liberalism Rawls represents is vulnerable and in retreat.