The Veil of Ignorance

 The Veil of Ignorance by John Rawls is one of the most influential philosophical ideas in the past century. It's a method of understanding what builds up a just society from scratch. One thinks that they're building a society from rock bottom, by imagining themselves in the situations before the society existed, which is called the Original Position. The idea is fundamentally looking at the society your present self is trying to build through your pre-society past self or should I say an older perspective, and judging whether it would approve of your actions as just or not. 

This process, of course, has a lot of weaknesses because the person and their Original Position would have fixed biases, and there would be a lot of disagreement between two people. However, this is the problem that John Rawls tries to address, and has found a solution for it. He first assumes certain things about people who design their own society. Their Original Positions are assumed to be all equal and free, but they can only choose from a 'menu' of views from The Western side of traditional philosophy regarding justice.

This is the part where the actual Veil of Ignorance plays a part - when people design their society, he asks them to imagine themselves having a very scarce amount of knowledge so that they don't have any biases. This is because any and all biases stem from


a knower's past knowledge or experience. The person designing their ideally just society now ensures that it purely benefits the people in a fair way, and has to stick to these choices they make even after they lift the 'Veil of Ignorance'. 


The main type of facts hidden through the Veil of Ignorance is the 'demographic' facts (wealthiness, race, personal strengths and weaknesses, and gender). Rawls states that these are all features that people acquired purely through luck, and thus they don't deserve the boons nor the banes from these features. Thus, one can't discriminate against a particular group like ethnicity or gender. In fact, the person designing the society should know absolutely nothing other than the basic general facts about human life, and especially not know how human society works. The Veil hides your beliefs, preferences, and ethical values. You should only know the truth about humanity and nothing else. 

This method helps two self-interested people come to a fair compromise by throwing away their biases with the Veil of Ignorance. It will also help sociologists deduce what exactly makes a society just and ideal, and analyze the present human society. 



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