What Is The Veil Of Ignorance

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Social justice is what people in society owe to one another in a matter of rights. It is whether people have entitlements to certain kinds of political and social arrangements, and as a result, to certain social outcomes. Rawls’ believes that justice is fairness, where social justice is the appropriate distribution of the burdens and benefits of society (1999: 4). He aims to further social justice in society using the theoretical devices of the Original Position and Veil of Ignorance. The intention of this thought experiment is to establish rules for a basic structure of society that would be fair and advance the interests of the parties involved. In this essay I will argue that Rawls’s theoretical devices of the Original Position and the Veil …show more content…
The Veil of Ignorance creates epistemic constraints for the parties. They do not know facts about themselves such as race, age, gender, psychological predispositions, or their social standing (Rawls 1999: 118). Parties also do not know their conception of the good which are views about what they find valuable or important to lead a good life. They do, however, have access to social, economic, and scientific theories to help create principles of justice. Perhaps parties are deprived of excessive knowledge, so much so they are psychologically unable to make a rational decision (Muldoon et al 2014: 2). This questions whether the agreement reached behind the Veil of Ignorance counts as one between real people. Parties are representative of people from society but the decision-making is stripped to a purely logical and objective decision. Although human beings are able to make decisions merely with a priori knowledge, most rational decisions require experience or an emotional thought process – something which Rawls has stripped away. Muldoon et al (2014) identifies logic alone could not tell parties in the Original Position how to see the world and how to measure it. They address this issue by stating that while the lack of knowledge is a problem in the Original Position, there is also another, more apparent problem. The issue is the disagreements about morality that would likely occur under the Veil of Ignorance (Muldoon et al 2014: 18). The Veil of Ignorance removes knowledge of moral considerations from the parties’ rational decision-making. This is an issue as logic cannot solely be what parties come to their conclusions by. Perspectives of the world have a larger effect on human reasoning than one might think. This would affect parties as Muldoon et al (2014) claim that these
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