The veil of ignorance

Imagine you were allowed to design the rules of a society, who gets what, how burdens and chances are shared out, what the law protects. But with one peculiar condition: you don't know which place you yourself will end up holding in it. You don't know whether you'll be born rich or poor, healthy or sick, gifted or ordinary, in the majority or the minority, strong or vulnerable. You stand behind what the philosopher John Rawls called the veil of ignorance. And only from there, he said, can you genuinely devise fair rules.

It is one of those thought experiments so simple that you almost miss its force. Because look at what it does. The moment you no longer know which place you'll get, the urge to bend the rules to your own advantage disappears. Someone who knows he is rich is happy to design rules that protect wealth; someone who knows he belongs to the majority easily forgets the minority. But behind the veil you don't know. And so, purely out of well-understood self-interest, you set about designing rules that are reasonable for every place, including the place you would least want. In other words, you start thinking about the weakest, because that could be you.

Fairness as impartiality

Rawls' deep point is that justice, at its core, is impartiality. A rule is fair if you would choose it without knowing where you yourself will land. That sounds abstract, but it is a surprisingly practical test, and not only for whole societies. You can lay it over any rule that divides people. A split within a team, an agreement between partners, the rules of a market, the terms of a contract: would you consent to it if you didn't know which side of the deal you'd be on? Would you find this rule just from the weakest position it allows?

From this Rawls drew a famous, contested conclusion: behind the veil, people would accept inequality only insofar as it also benefits the worst-off. Not strict equality, differences are allowed, if they enlarge the pie in such a way that even the bottom layer is better off. But no differences that enrich the top at the expense of the bottom. Whether that specific conclusion holds is exactly where the great debate begins, thinkers like Robert Nozick objected that the way you acquire something counts too, not just the distribution. The experiment forces no single answer. But it does purify the question.

A test you can use

That is where the lasting value lies, apart from Rawls' political conclusions. The veil of ignorance is a tool for switching off your own interest for a moment and seeing a rule as an impartial observer would see it. And you notice at once how often your judgement about what is "fair" was secretly leaning on the fact that you happened to be on the good side. Set side by side, it is a relative of Adam Smith's impartial spectator: both ask you to forget your own position and to judge as if it were not you who came out better or worse off.

A moment to take with you: pick a rule or arrangement that you currently benefit from. Ask honestly: would I find this rule just if I stood on the other, weaker side. And didn't know which side I would get? The answer tells you something about the rule. And something about yourself.