Firstly, he makes some assumptions about the people designing their own society. Rawls’s solution to this problem comes in two parts. The process is thus vulnerable to biases, disagreements, and the potential for majority groups ganging up on minority groups. Of course, if we were designing a society in the Original Position, people might try to ensure that it works in their favour. We can then start thinking about how to make our actual society look more like the ideal picture we have imagined. The idea is that social justice will be whatever reasonable people would agree to in such a situation. It is a purely hypothetical idea: our job in thinking about justice is to imagine that we are designing a society from scratch. To be clear, Rawls does not think we can actually return to this original position, or even that it ever existed. We therefore need to imagine ourselves in a situation before any particular society exists Rawls calls this situation the Original Position. According to Rawls,, working out what justice requires demands that we think as if we are building society from the ground up, in a way that everyone who is reasonable can accept. The Veil of Ignorance is a way of working out the basic institutions and structures of a just society.

John Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance is probably one of the most influential philosophical ideas of the 20th century. Email This work released under a CC-BY license. His work focuses mainly on health care justice, but he also has interests in human enhancement, animal ethics and well-being.

Ben Davies is a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls