John Rawls asked a deceptively simple question in 1971: what would a fair society look like if the people designing it did not know who they would be in it? Strip away, for a moment, everything you know about yourself — your wealth, your class, your talents, your health, your race, your religion. Rawls called this standpoint the original position, and the thing that blinds you to your own identity the veil of ignorance. From behind it, he argued, you would choose the rules of society as fair terms of cooperation, because you could no longer tilt them in your own favour.
The genius of the device is what it does to self-interest. Ordinarily, the rich argue for low taxes and the poor for redistribution, each reasoning from where they happen to stand. Behind the veil, you cannot do that — because you might be either. So the rational strategy shifts. Rawls argued you would reason by maximin: since you could turn out to be the worst-off person in the society, you would design it so that even the worst-off position is as good as possible. You have just felt this yourself if the veil lifted and left you somewhere you would not have chosen.
What falls out of itThe two principles of justice.
From the original position Rawls derived two principles. First, each person is entitled to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all — freedoms that cannot be traded away for economic gain. Second, social and economic inequalities are permitted only if they satisfy the difference principle: they must work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. Inequality is not banned; it is put on a leash. A doctor may earn more than a clerk — but only because that arrangement, in the end, also lifts the person at the bottom.
The strongest objectionsWhere critics push back.
The veil has powerful critics. Robert Nozick argued it asks the wrong question entirely: justice is not about the pattern of who ends up with what, but about whether each person acquired their holdings fairly, through free exchange and honest work. Redistributing to fit a chosen pattern, he argued, overrides the liberty of the people whose holdings are moved. Others doubt the psychology — would people really be so cautious behind the veil, or might they gamble on landing well? And communitarian thinkers question the very picture of a self that can be peeled away from its community, its history, and its commitments, to choose in a vacuum.
Rawls never claimed the veil described how societies actually form. It is a test, not a history — a way of checking whether the rules you defend are ones you could accept without knowing your seat at the table. That is why it still bites. Run it a few more times above, landing somewhere new each time, and notice which societies you can live with no matter who you turn out to be. That set, Rawls would say, is where justice begins.