Rawls' Veil of Ignorance: Designing a Just Society

How do we build a fair society? John Rawls, the most important political philosopher of the 20th century, proposed a thought experiment: imagine you are designing a society from scratch, but you do so behind a "veil of ignorance." You don’t know your gender, race, class, intelligence, or abilities. You don’t know if you’ll be born rich or poor, gifted or disabled. From this position of radical uncertainty, what principles would you choose? Rawls argued you would choose two: first, equal basic liberties for all; second, social and economic inequalities are only acceptable if they benefit the least advantaged (the Difference Principle). The veil of ignorance is a powerful tool for stripping away our biases and thinking about justice from a truly impartial perspective.