Justice as Fairness: The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls (1921 to 2002) published A Theory of Justice in 1971, reviving political philosophy as a serious academic discipline at a moment when it had been largely displaced by metaethics and linguistic analysis. The book is a sustained argument against utilitarianism and for a contract-based theory of justice, using the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant while transforming it into a rigorous analytical framework.

Rawls''s central target is the utilitarian approach to social justice: the view that the just society is the one that maximizes aggregate welfare. His fundamental objection is that utilitarianism fails to take seriously the separateness of persons: it treats the distribution of welfare across individuals as if it were the distribution of welfare within a single person''s life, where sacrifice now for gain later is unproblematic. But sacrificing the welfare of some persons for the greater aggregate welfare of others treats those persons merely as means, ignoring their separate claims to moral consideration.

Rawls''s alternative is justice as fairness: the principles of justice are those that free and rational persons would choose in an initial position of equality, not knowing which position in society they would occupy. The original position is this hypothetical choice situation: the parties to the contract are choosing the basic structure of society (its fundamental institutions, its distribution of rights and economic advantages) without knowing their place in society, their class position, their fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, or even their conception of the good. As the SEP entry explains, the veil of ignorance is designed to be a ''thick'' screen that deprives the parties of ''all knowledge of particular facts about themselves, about one another, and even about their society and its history.''

Why is this device philosophically important? Because it models the moral requirement of impartiality. As the PDF source on the veil of ignorance explains, ''acting from the original position hence, the principle of social justice can be achieved. This veil blinds people to all facts about themselves that might becloud what notion of justice is developed, because this veil at the end leads to principles which are fair to all.''

The original position is not a description of an actual historical contract or a thought experiment about what people actually would choose in such a situation. It is a device of representation: a way of formalizing the conditions of fair choice, so that whatever principles are selected under those conditions can be claimed to be fair, and therefore just. If I do not know whether I will be the most or least advantaged member of society, I have no self-interested reason to choose principles that favor one group over another. My choice will reflect what is genuinely fair from any position.

Rawls argues that behind the veil of ignorance, rational parties would not choose the utilitarian principle of maximizing aggregate welfare. This is because the utilitarian principle would, in principle, license arrangements in which the welfare of the least advantaged is drastically reduced for the benefit of the majority. A rational person who does not know which position they will occupy will not risk being the least advantaged under such a system. They will adopt a maximin strategy: choosing the principles that maximize the position of the worst-off representative person in society. This is the rational strategy under uncertainty when the stakes are high and the worst-case outcome is very bad.