What Is the Veil of Ignorance? Rawls's Thought Experiment

Direct Answer

The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment devised by the American philosopher John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). It asks what principles of justice rational, self-interested parties would agree to for governing their society if they had no knowledge of their own place within it. Behind the veil, no one knows their social class, race, gender, wealth, natural talents, intelligence, religion, or even their particular conception of the good life. Denied the information that would let them tailor principles to their own advantage, the parties are forced to reason impartially. The setting in which they deliberate Rawls calls the "original position," and the veil of ignorance is its defining feature.

The point of the device is to model fairness. If you know you are wealthy, you may favor low taxes; if you know you are poor, you may favor heavy redistribution; if you know you belong to a particular faith, you may favor its establishment. Each of these choices is biased by self-interest dressed up as principle. By withholding all such knowledge, the veil ensures that the principles chosen cannot be rigged in advance. The parties must ask, in effect, what rules they would accept for a society in which they might occupy any position. Since anyone might turn out to be the least advantaged member, prudent parties will insist on principles that protect the worst-off. From this constraint, Rawls argues, the parties would converge on two principles of justice — equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities arranged so as to benefit the least advantaged and attached to offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.

Crucially, the veil is not a claim that people are actually ignorant, nor that there was ever a historical bargain. It is what Rawls calls a "device of representation": a way of displaying the conditions under which agreement would be fair, and thereby testing which principles truly merit our assent. The original position is to justice as the state of nature was to the older social contract theorists — a hypothetical starting point whose purpose is argumentative, not historical.

Historical Context

Rawls developed the veil of ignorance against a specific intellectual background. By the mid-twentieth century, utilitarianism had become the dominant framework in English-language moral and political philosophy, and the social contract tradition associated with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau had largely fallen out of fashion. Rawls set out to revive the contract tradition and to provide a systematic alternative to utilitarianism, which he regarded as unable to take seriously the separateness of persons — the fact that losses to one individual cannot simply be offset by greater gains to another.

The social contract theorists had imagined a state of nature in which individuals agree to establish political authority for mutual benefit. Hobbes derived absolute sovereignty from the fear of violent death; Locke grounded government in the protection of natural rights; Rousseau tied legitimate authority to the general will. Rawls took the contract's central insight — that legitimate principles are those that free and equal persons would agree to — and recast it in explicitly moral terms. His original position is a purified version of the state of nature, stripped of empirical speculation about human psychology and designed to express a conception of persons as free and equal.

The other decisive influence was Kant. Rawls described his theory as a form of Kantian constructivism: the principles of justice are not discovered in an independent moral order but constructed by rational agents under conditions that express their nature as autonomous beings. The veil of ignorance enforces a Kantian requirement — that moral principles be chosen without regard to contingent inclinations or empirical advantages — because it screens off exactly the contingencies that would let one person's interests override another's. In this sense the original position is a procedural rendering of Kant's idea that the moral law is what rational beings would legislate for themselves.

Philosophical Perspectives

The Reasoning of the Parties

Behind the veil, the parties are assumed to be rational and mutually disinterested — each wants to advance their own conception of the good, though they do not know what that conception is. They are not altruistic, but they are also not envious. Given this setup, Rawls argues they would reason by a conservative strategy he calls "maximin": choose the arrangement whose worst possible outcome is better than the worst possible outcome of any alternative. The justification is that, with no knowledge of the probabilities governing their future position, the parties cannot afford to gamble. They must protect against the possibility of landing at the bottom of the social structure.

This is why the veil yields anti-utilitarian conclusions. A utilitarian principle would permit sacrificing the interests of some for the greater aggregate good of others. Behind the veil, no one can accept a principle that might condemn them, as a particular individual, to misery so that others may flourish more. The separateness of persons, which utilitarianism tends to blur, becomes decisive: each party must be able to endorse the principles as protecting them, not merely as maximizing a social total.

The Two Principles

Rawls contends that the parties would choose two principles, ordered lexically. The first guarantees each person an equal right to the most extensive scheme of basic liberties compatible with a like scheme for all — freedom of thought, conscience, association, and the like. The second governs social and economic arrangements: inequalities are permissible only if they are attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This last clause is the celebrated "difference principle." The lexical priority of liberty means that basic liberties cannot be traded away for economic gains; the priority of fair opportunity over the difference principle means that equality of opportunity is secured before redistribution is considered.

The veil explains why these, rather than utilitarian or libertarian principles, would be chosen. Equal basic liberties are demanded because, not knowing one's values, one must protect the conditions for pursuing any conception of the good. The difference principle is demanded because, not knowing one's talents or class, one must ensure that even the worst position in society is as good as it reasonably can be. The result is a conception of justice as fairness — fair because the principles are chosen under conditions no one could reasonably reject.

Critiques and Alternatives

The veil has drawn sustained criticism. Robert Nozick's libertarian response held that the original position illegitimately treats individual talents and holdings as a common pool to be distributed, ignoring the rights people have over themselves and their legitimately acquired property. Communitarian critics, notably Michael Sandel, argued that the veil strips away the very commitments, relationships, and identities that constitute the self and make moral reasoning possible; a person so radically abstracted from their ends, they charged, is no one in particular and cannot meaningfully choose. The utilitarian economist John Harsanyi countered that fully rational parties behind a veil would choose to maximize average utility rather than apply maximin, since expected-utility reasoning is the rational standard under uncertainty. Feminist and critical theorists have pressed the concern that the original position's abstracted, unencumbered self reflects a particular — and gendered — conception of the person that obscures the role of family, care, and social structure in shaping citizens. Rawls's defenders have answered each line of criticism, and the veil remains one of the most debated devices in political philosophy.

Modern Reflection

The veil of ignorance has proved remarkably generative beyond the academic debate that produced it. As a general heuristic for fairness, it asks any decision-maker to consider a rule while ignorant of how it will affect them personally — a test with wide application. It informs discussions of constitutional design, tax policy, and the structure of the welfare state, where the question of what we would accept not knowing our own position provides a powerful check on self-serving argument. It has been extended to intergenerational justice and climate ethics: if parties did not know to which generation they would belong, they would have reason to adopt sustainable principles that protect future people who cannot speak for themselves.

Rawls's later work, Political Liberalism (1993), reframed the original position within the idea of public reason. In societies whose citizens hold incompatible but reasonable comprehensive doctrines, the veil models the kind of justification appropriate to political life — reasons that all citizens, regardless of their particular worldview, can be expected to endorse. This shift made the veil less a metaphysical claim about the self and more a standard for democratic deliberation, broadening its relevance to pluralist societies.

The device's limits are also instructive. The veil abstracts from the empirical realities of power, history, and social identity that shape actual injustice, and some argue that real progress requires confronting those realities directly rather than reasoning from a hypothetical standpoint. Others worry that the maximin strategy is excessively risk-averse and that the difference principle is more demanding than most societies accept. These disagreements do not diminish the veil's importance; they confirm it. Half a century after Rawls proposed it, the thought experiment remains the reference point for asking what a truly fair society would require — and the standard against which answers must be measured.

Related Thinkers

• John Rawls — Devised the veil of ignorance and the original position as the core of his theory of justice as fairness.
• Immanuel Kant — Provided the constructivist inspiration: the original position models what free and equal rational beings would legislate, screening off contingent advantage.
• John Locke — A founder of the social contract tradition Rawls revived, grounding legitimate authority in agreement among free persons.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Anticipated the link between legitimate principles and what equal citizens would will together under the general will.
• Thomas Hobbes — Supplied the state-of-nature framework that Rawls transformed into the hypothetical original position.

Related Books

• A Theory of Justice — The 1971 work in which Rawls sets out the original position, the veil of ignorance, and the two principles of justice.

Related Quotes

• Rawls on the veil of ignorance — Rawls specifies that behind the veil no one knows their place in society, class, status, or fortune in the distribution of natural abilities — the ignorance that secures impartiality.
• Rawls on justice as fairness — "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought." The opening of A Theory of Justice frames the ambition that the veil is designed to realize.

Related Topics

• The good life — Rawls's parties do not know their conception of the good, yet they must design a society in which any reasonable good life can be pursued.
• Philosophy of life — The veil asks how the basic structure of a society should be arranged to be fair to every way of life its citizens might adopt.

Further Learning

• See What is justice as fairness? for the full theory the veil is designed to justify.
• See What is social contract theory? for the tradition Rawls revived and transformed.
• See What is utilitarianism? for the framework Rawls's original position is built to oppose.
• Explore the concepts of justice, rights, and freedom that the two principles protect.

Sources

1. "Rawls." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/
2. "John Rawls." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/rawls/
3. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (1971). Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
4. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
5. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.