Behind the Veil
A just distribution can be judged by fairness, by liberty, or by need — and Rawls's veil of ignorance is one influential test for principles no one could reasonably reject. · 13 min
A society produces a heap of good things — money, schooling, health care, opportunity — and then has to settle who gets what. Call a settlement just or unjust and you have made a serious claim, one that needs a standard behind it. The trouble is that there are several standards, and they pull in different directions. Before you can call a distribution fair, you have to say what "fair" is being measured against.
Guess before you learn
Suppose you had to choose the rules for a whole society before knowing who you would be in it — rich or poor, healthy or sick, gifted or struggling. What rules would you most likely choose?
Not knowing your place, you cannot safely bet on landing at the top — so a cautious chooser protects the bottom, because that bottom might be yours. This is the heart of John Rawls's argument, and you just reconstructed it from your own reasoning. If you guessed differently, keep the pencil mark: whether ignorance really forces this choice is exactly where critics push back.
There are three broad families of answer to "what makes a distribution just?" — fairness, liberty, and need. They are genuine rivals; a case that looks just by one can look unjust by another. Rawls's veil of ignorance is a device built to settle the first of them, and it is worth understanding on its own before we set the three standards against each other.
9–12
3–5
There are three ways to decide who gets what. Fair to all: choose rules you would accept without knowing who you turn out to be. Free for all: let people keep what they earn and trade, and do not interfere. By need: give the most to those who lack the most. Each sounds right until it meets the others — and the "don't know who you'll be" trick is one clever way to be fair.
6–8
The three standards have champions. Fairness: John Rawls asks what principles we would choose behind a veil of ignorance — not knowing our wealth, health, or talents — and argues we would protect the worst-off. Liberty: Robert Nozick asks instead whether holdings arose by free and honest steps; if they did, the result is just even when unequal, and redistribution violates people's rights. Need: a long tradition answers simply that goods should go to whoever needs them most. Notice these can disagree about the very same society.
9–12
Rawls's device is the original position: imagine choosing society's basic rules behind a veil of ignorance that hides your place in it. Rational choosers, he argues, would pick two principles — first, equal basic liberties for all; second, that social and economic inequalities are allowed only if they attach to fair equality of opportunity and work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. That last clause is the difference principle: inequality is just only when it lifts the bottom.
Nozick replies that justice is historical, not patterned. If holdings arose by just acquisition and just transfer, the result is just, however unequal — and any principle fixing a pattern must keep interfering with free choices to hold it. His Wilt Chamberlain case: from any distribution you call fair, let people freely pay to watch a gifted player, and the pattern dissolves through nothing but voluntary choices.
K–2
You have to cut a cake. But here is the rule: you get your slice last, and you do not get to pick. Suddenly you cut every slice the same. Not knowing which is yours made you fair.
That is the whole idea. When you do not know who you will be, you stop giving yourself the biggest piece. You make rules that would be all right for anyone.
Undergrad
Rawls frames the original position as a choice under uncertainty and argues for maximin: with no probabilities to work from and everything at stake, rank options by their worst outcome and choose the best of those. Hence the difference principle and the lexical priority of the basic liberties over the second principle. The chosen currency is primary goods — the all-purpose means (rights, opportunities, income, the bases of self-respect) any rational plan of life requires.
The rival programs are sharp. Harsanyi accepts a veil but assumes an equal chance of being anyone, deriving average utilitarianism, not maximin — so the veil alone does not yield Rawls's conclusion; the attitude to risk does. Nozick's entitlement theory rejects end-state patterns for just process. Luck egalitarians aim instead to neutralize brute luck while holding people responsible for their choices. Each answers "equality of what?" differently: welfare, resources, primary goods, or capabilities.
Postgrad
The Rawls–Harsanyi dispute is a disagreement about the decision theory of the original position: identical veils yield maximin or expected-utility maximization depending on whether the parties reason without probabilities under a Knightian ignorance (Rawls) or with a principle of insufficient reason assigning uniform priors (Harsanyi). Rawls's defense of maximin restricts it to choices where the stakes include the very framework of one's life and the gains above the guaranteed minimum are marginal — conditions that do not generalize.
Three fault lines remain live. The currency debate (Sen's capabilities and Dworkin's resources against primary goods) asks what justice should equalize. Cohen presses the incentives critique: if the difference principle's inequalities are justified only because talented producers demand them, a genuinely just ethos would not make that demand — so the principle concedes too much to self-interest. And Nozick's Chamberlain argument reframes the dispute as pattern versus history.
the veil of ignorance
Rawls's thought experiment: choose society's basic rules without knowing your own place in it — your wealth, health, talents, or beliefs. Stripped of that knowledge, you cannot tailor the rules to favor yourself, so the principles you would accept count as fair.
The veil is not just a slogan; it is a procedure you can run. Take a concrete choice a society faces and reason it through from behind the veil, step by step. The move that does the work is refusing to peek at which person you will be — because the moment you know you are the talented one, you start writing rules that reward talent, and fairness slips away.
Apply the veil of ignorance to a schooling rule — the steps fade as you master them
Behind the veil: you do not yet know which student in this society you will be.
Rule A funds elite schools only: the top thrive, the bottom get very little. Rule B funds every school decently: the bottom gain most, the top give up a little.
Rule A's worst case: a neglected school. Rule B's worst case: a decent school for everyone.
Choose Rule B. Principle: an inequality is just only if it improves the position of the worst-off — the difference principle.
Now set the standards against each other. Rawls's two principles guarantee equal basic liberties first, then permit economic inequality only when it lifts the least advantaged. Nozick objects that any such patterned goal must keep overriding people's free choices to hold the pattern in place. His challenge is not that Rawls is heartless but that fairness of outcome and freedom of process genuinely conflict — and you cannot have both without limit.
Why is this true?
Why does Nozick think even a distribution everyone agrees is fair can become unjust to maintain?
Because free choices constantly disturb any fixed pattern — people give, trade, and spend as they like. To keep the pattern in place you must forbid some of those voluntary choices, and forbidding voluntary, harmless exchange is itself, Nozick argues, a violation of liberty.
Weigh them honestly and the disagreement is real, not a mistake either side is making. Rawls captures the intuition that a good society answers to the worst-off; Nozick captures the intuition that people own the fruits of their free choices. A third tradition insists neither fully honors need. Scholarship has not crowned a winner, and the study is not poorer for it — knowing precisely where fairness, liberty, and need part company is what lets you argue about a tax or a school system without talking past everyone else.
You now hold the map of the modern argument about justice: three standards, one famous device for the first of them, and a clear-eyed sense of where they collide. The next folio narrows the lens from how a society shares its goods to how far it may reach into a single life — the question of liberty and its limits.
Note
Running a thought experiment like the veil — holding your own interests out of the reasoning on purpose — is a discipline drilled in the Atelier of Mind, the college's thinking workshop.
Practice — new ink and old, interleaved
1.From memory: state Kant's two formulations of the categorical imperative.
First, act only on a maxim you could will to become a universal law that everyone follows. Second, treat humanity, in yourself and in others, always as an end and never merely as a means.
How close were you? Grade yourself honestly — it sets your review date.
2.Recalling folio 2: standardize “Since all triangles have three sides, and this shape is a triangle, this shape has three sides.” List the premises, then the conclusion.
3.A country's wealth is very unequal, but every holding arose from honest work and free trade. Who is most likely to call this distribution just?
4.Interleave, folio 3. Rawls's veil argument is valid. In one sentence, say what a critic must therefore do to resist its conclusion.
5.Interleave, folio 10. For a consequentialist, the right action is the one that —
6.Four reasons are offered against a factory closing a polluting plant. Which one is the consequentialist reason?
7.Interleave, folio 11. Kant's categorical imperative tells you to act only on a principle that —
8.Match each Kantian term to its meaning.
9.In one sentence, state Harsanyi's objection: why does accepting the veil not automatically give you Rawls's conclusion?