Rawlsian fairness isn't really fair.

Rawls was a famous political philosopher, and one of his most known concepts is the veil of ignorance. We cover this concept as a path here (https://schrodingers.cat/paths/political-philosophy-rawls/step/1).

It seems quite intuitive that if you had to design a world without knowing which person you would be, then you would make the world as equal as possible. But in the end, we don't know what equality really means. Equality is a more diverse and ambigious notion than what many people might think. What is justice? What is predetermined? What is religion?

Let's say that you are creating a world, and you want it to treat minorities well because you might be born as a minority. That makes sense.

But what if you might be born as something you deem morally awful? Or unthinkable? Let's say that you are born as a pyromaniac. You probably shouldn't design a world to support pyromaniacs.

Of course, people are not born pyromaniacs. My argument can be reduced to, "There must be some level of unfairness designed in Rawlsian fairness in order to tolerate the majority of people." And this is because we, subconsciously or consciously, socially select against what is deemed dangerous or unacceptable. And what society deems as such is always changing. If you asked someone two hundred years ago, they would likely not tolerate LGBTQ+ rights and therefore would never consider creating those rights. Just like we in our current world likely would not tolerate a pyromaniac. Equality is not static, and it is always changing because our ideals are always changing. The debate over whether or not our cultural values are "progressing" ties into (anti-)humanism, which is also covered as multiple paths on this site.

It's kind of like the tolerance paradox, but in relation to Rawlsian fairness.