John Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance Test for a Fair Society

John Rawls's veil of ignorance asks which society you would choose to be born into without knowing your place, and most nations still fail his fairness test.

Rawls, a Baltimore born philosopher who lost two brothers to illnesses they caught from him, laid out the idea in A Theory of Justice in 1971.

The thought experiment pictures a mind hovering above the planet before birth, ignorant of whether it will land in a wealthy Scottsdale family or a struggling Detroit neighborhood.

Rawls saw rags to riches stories as a political sleight of hand that spares the comfortable from imagining any life but their own, and from reforming society.

Faced with a blind draw, any sane chooser would demand excellent schools, working hospitals, fair courts and decent housing for all, which looks less like the United States than Denmark or Switzerland.

A society becomes fair only when someone could honestly say they would not mind which parents or neighborhood fate handed them.

The veil of ignorance outlived its author because it turns fairness from a grievance into a test anyone can run. A Theory of Justice sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States alone and rebuilt political philosophy as a field, The Guardian noted when Rawls died in 2002. Rawls drew a sharper rule from it: inequality is tolerable only if it lifts the least advantaged. Critics never conceded. Robert Nozick argued in 1974 that rights exist before any social bargain, and John Harsanyi held that choosers behind the veil would maximize average welfare instead, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy records. Watch whether the next fight over school or hospital funding gets argued from behind the veil.