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>What is the Veil of Ignorance?
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>Carrol
People with different interests and knowledge about themselves or their circumstances will inevitably disagree not only about what is good, but also about what is a fair way to divide up the benefits and burdens of social life. John Rawls proposes the following procedure to get agreement on principles of justice to govern this division. We are to imagine parties who are deprived of knowledge of their sex, race, class, nationality, as well as their special talents or disabilities, and their particular conception of the good. This is the VI. They know only that they want more rather than less of the goods that are instrumental to whatever else they want: freedoms, opportunities, and wealth. Then they choose principles that govern the distribution of those goods, These are the correct principles of justice.
There are three of them, which Rawls confusingly calls the "two" principles of justice: (1) everyone gets the most extensive freedom compatible with equal liberty for all; (2) everyone gets "fair" equal opportunity, which means not the same life chances, but if anyone gets better ones than anyone else, it must be to benefit the least well off, and (3) any differences if wealth or income must be to the benefit of the least well off. These are in descending order of importance.
Rawls thinks we can know these are the correct principles because they are chosen by a fair means, one that excludes all morally irrelevant information and precludes bargaining from advantage. To put the idea vividly, you don't know behind the VI whether you are Bill Gates or a poor black girl in Georgia with AIDS, so you will choose principles of justice that will not harm the latter even if you turn out to be the former.
It's a very attractive idea, one that has dominated modern political philosophy for the 30 years since the publication of A Theory of Justice, and it is certainly deep and extraordinarily rich. I think it is wrong, but wrong the way the great philosophical ideas are wrong.
jks
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