Comment: ‘Veil of ignorance. (2010)
The veil of ignorance is the informational constraint John Rawls imposes on the parties to the original position in A Theory of Justice (1971). It is not the contract but its filter: fairness in the outcome is produced by what the choosers are denied.
What it screens out and what it lets through
- Hidden: class and status, natural assets, one’s conception of the good, psychological traits such as a taste for risk, the circumstances of one’s own society, and one’s generation. Later works name race and sex explicitly.
- Known: general social and economic facts; the circumstances of justice (moderate scarcity, conflicting claims); and a thin theory of the good — whatever one’s plan, more primary goods are better.
Why Rawls draws it
- Moral arbitrariness: birth and talent are “neither just nor unjust”; knowing them would let each party tailor principles to himself.
- Impartiality by design: no one can favour himself, so what is chosen is fair because the situation is — pure procedural justice.
- Unanimity: identically placed parties share the same reasons, so the choice is that of one person selected at random; nothing is left to bargain over.
- No probabilities: the veil is deliberately thick. Unable to estimate their chances, facing grave stakes in a once-for-all choice, the parties reason by maximin, securing the best worst position — hence equal liberty and the difference principle. In §40 Rawls reads the device as a procedural rendering of Immanuel Kant‘s autonomy.
In the four-stage sequence (§31) the veil is lifted gradually — constitutional convention, legislature, then judges applying rules — each stage withholding only what would bias its decision.
Critiques aimed at the veil
- John C. Harsanyi (1953, 1955) used a thinner veil — each chooser assumes an equal chance of being anyone — and derived average utilitarianism. Experiments agree: veil reasoning moved subjects toward the greater good in Karen Huang, Joshua Greene and Max Bazerman (2019), but toward the worst-off when Laura Weidinger and colleagues (2023) asked how an AI system should allocate help. The specification of the veil, not the veil, decides.
- Michael Sandel: the chooser is an unencumbered self, stripped of constitutive attachments; Rawls replies that the veil models fair reasoning and makes no claim about what persons are.
- Susan Moller Okin repairs it: hide one’s sex explicitly, and the family must be judged as part of the basic structure.
- Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009): its closed impartiality admits only members of one polity, risking procedural parochialism; he prefers Adam Smith‘s impartial spectator.
An Indian illustration
Veil reasoning explains universal provision. Illness in old age is a risk no one can rule out; the 2024 extension of Ayushman Bharat PM-JAY to everyone aged 70 and above, regardless of income, is insurance a chooser ignorant of his future would buy. B. R. Ambedkar marks the limit: a society of graded inequality lacks the free and equal persons the veil presupposes.
Conclusion
The veil turns impartiality from exhortation into a design rule — modern political theory’s most productive abstraction. Since a differently drawn veil yields utilitarianism, it proves less than Rawls claimed and is best used as a test that exposes partiality in principles rather than a machine that derives them.