However, what he does believe is that every individual should be taken to have equal moral status i.e. Rather than worrying about the substantive conclusions Rawls reaches, as Nozick does, this criticism worries about the very coherence of reasoned discussion behind the Veil of Ignorance. I have long been thinking about 'evil', or whatever you want to call it, as often existing. I think it would be a mistake to suggest that it relies on the idea that people could be 'exchanged'; firstly, it is just a thought experiment designed to generate certain kinds of conclusions in the right way, and so doesn't really have a lot to do with actual people, and secondly, its aim is to arrive at principles that can ensure the just social co-existence of people who, indeed, aren't interchangeable. Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice, 20. Nonetheless, this conclusion is consistent with recognising two mistakes in making use of the Veil of Ignorance. Firstly, recognising the importance of abstraction should not come at the cost of considering the real, concrete impact of policies we adopt, or of the social and historical context they are part of. The Veil of Ignorance is a way of working out the basic institutions and structures of a just society. Firstly, recognising the importance of abstraction should not come at the cost of considering the real, concrete impact of policies we adopt, or of the social and historical context they are part of. People in the Original Position are assumed to be free and equal, and to have certain motivations: they want to do well for themselves, but they are prepared to adhere to reasonable terms of cooperation, so long as others do too. A rational person behind the Veil might want to try to find a way to give a special place to such values, while protecting dissenters. And that's only a small tip of the iceberg; it's really great stuff. In John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, he argues that morally, society should be constructed politically as if we were all behind a veil of ignorance; that is, the rules and precepts of society should be constructed as if we had no a priori knowledge of our future wealth, talents, and social status, and could be placed in any other person's societal This is still self interest, by the way. What is actually going on here is that the method, in the thought experiment, of depriving the deliberating parties of information is a way of building in fairness and impartiality into the deliberation. Environmental Ethics and Climate Change, 29. He denounces any attempt by government to redistribute capital or income on the basis of individual need as an unacceptable intrusion upon individual freedom (bringing in shades of Nozick's critique, which accuses distributive justice of being in contradiction with Rawls's own expansive theory of individual rights). After balancing the pros and cons of publicity, Bentham concludes: "The system of secresy has therefore a useful tendency in those circumstances in which publicity exposes the voter to the influence of a particular interest opposed to the public interest. For more on this, check out Equality and Partiality. If you had to design a good life for yourself, youd go for the specific things you care about. Indeed, no system of rules of just individual conduct, and therefore no free action of the individuals, could produce results satisfying any principle of distributive justice. John Rawlss Veil of Ignorance is probably one of the most influential philosophical ideas of the 20th century. (p. 6970). Justice is a complicated concept that at its core requires fairness. As with any influential philosopher, Rawls has been the subject of much criticism and disagreement. Summary: The Veil Of Ignorance - 574 Words | Internet Public Library A second criticism also concerns the fact that, behind the Veil, various facts are hidden from you. Since one of the facts that is hidden by the veil is the nature of the society you live in, we may assume that the resulting principles are supposed to be applicable in all societies, though this is a view that Rawls attempted to reject in later work. As such, whatever principles these imaginary parties would choose will be fair and impartial. but "what social arrangement would you pick if you did not know your place in it?". People in the Original Position are assumed to be free and equal, and to have certain motivations: they want to do well for themselves, but they are prepared to adhere to reasonable terms of cooperation, so long as others do too. It may be more productive to consider issues of justice from both the kind of abstracted view represented by the Veil of Ignorance, and from the more concrete view advocated by its critics. The Veil of Ignorance is a device for helping people more fairly envision a fair society by pretending that they are ignorant of their personal circumstances. Even if the details face problems, Rawlss Veil of Ignorance shows us that it can be valuable to imagine things from opposing points of view. Fair equality of opportunity says that positions which bring unequal payoffs must be open to people of equal talents and equal willingness to use them on an equal basis. Phronesis by Ben Davies is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Pros & Features regarding of Social Treaty Jump to Business. Which if any contemporary philosophers have written about the potential negative effects of "reverse" discrimination? I've not explained it particularly well but it is easy to look up and is often called the 'dependence critique' of Rawls. Secondly, using the veil to argue for distributive justice and egalitarianism, as Rawls does, in my opinion seems to presume that moral virtue is orthogonal to societal position, so that it is only "fair" that we "start off on the same foot"; I don't agree with that either, because I think the poor, at least in America, are somewhat less virtuous than middle America or the rich, and that a moral accounting behind this veil would in any case send these lacking to the same positions they occupy.