Veil of Ignorance
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What it is
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A thought experiment by John Rawls: to judge whether a social arrangement is just, imagine designing it without knowing what position you'd personally occupy within it — your class, abilities, or (as applied here) your religion or culture of birth.
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Intuition
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If you don't know in advance whether you'll be born into the group that benefits from a rule or the group disadvantaged by it, you're forced to judge the rule on fairness rather than self-interest.
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How it works
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Strip away knowledge of your own particular identity and circumstances ("the veil").
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From behind this veil, ask which rules or institutions you would choose, since you could end up in any position.
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Rules that only look fair to people who already know they're on the winning side get exposed as self-serving rather than just.
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Example
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If you didn't know which religion (or none) you'd be born into, would you design a world where children are permanently marked with their parents' religious identity at birth, with no chance to examine alternatives? The argument is most people, from behind the veil, would not choose this — exposing the current arrangement as arbitrary rather than natural.
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Related
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