Ignorance can be bliss

How a “Veil of Ignorance” can help us all

Posted on Sept 2023, updated Oct 2025

In today’s world, we all seem to be grasping for moral or ethical absolutes that aren’t there. Maybe some things aren’t really arguable; for example we can all agree that murder is wrong. But agreement is one thing, proof is another. Can we prove it? What about things that aren’t as agreed-on as murder? If I’ll be damaged by a policy but you’ll be killed by it, can you prove we shouldn’t have the policy? Is slavery OK? Few people today think so, but centuries ago most people thought it was. Can we prove it today? Is a politician obligated to serve the People, or is that just a charmingly naive hope? Can we prove it?

No, most ethical questions aren’t as cut-and-dried as murder, most need some subtlety to decide. In a world where few people agree on anything, or in today’s world where most people scream positions rather than trying to support them, how can we possibly decide what to do when a ‘provable’ solution might not exist?

This question bothered philosopher John Rawls in the late 60’s, so in 1971 he answered it with his landmark book “Theory of Justice”, and the “Veil of Ignorance”. It seemed to be a mashup of religions’ “Do unto others” dictums with some Rand Corporation Game Theory, but it gave a way to analyze societal, ethical, or political questions from a neutral position. Here’s how it works…

The participants’ task is to make rules for a society (or create an organization, or solve a problem) in a way that would be fair to ALL involved. They are told they will eventually have to live under the rules they create.
Participants start their inquiry in an imaginary ‘original position’ before laws or rules. Here’s where the Veil of Ignorance comes in… they know they’ll have to follow thee rules they make when they’re done, but they don’t know who they will be in the finished product. When they make the rules they know nothing about their gender, race, age, intelligence, wealth, skills, education, religion, or anything else… they’re just people, just players.
Participants are assumed to have all the basic capacities needed to participate in a mutually cooperative society, and none will be refused membership in the society.
Individuals are assumed to be able to form, pursue, and revise their concept of ‘good’, or a ‘good life’, as they see fit within their own minds. Whether or not Society eventually supports it, they can reason to their view of ‘the good’ on their own.
Individuals are assumed to be able to form a concept of right and wrong, and have a general aptitude to abide by it.

Given these basics, the participants set rules for the task at hand. Because you don’t know who you would be in the new system, it makes no sense to disadvantage any subgroups or individuals because YOU could find yourself in one of the groups that gets the short end of the stick! In these conditions, research has shown participants tend to propose egalitarian systems out of their own rational self-interest.

“Wait!” someone says. “Why assume people want to abide by a right/wrong standard? What about the people who will upset the applecart?” Good question, because any society has to deal with violence, criminals, and threats. (See this article on Dealing With Bad Actors for suggestions on what to do with people who hate applecarts) The Veil encourages a fair solution because the rules apply to everyone. You may be criminal or judge, victim or bystander or uninterested party, and all those roles have interests. But remember, YOU don’t know who YOU’LL be when it plays out. If you support a harsh or even tortuous justice system lacking due process, you’d be very disappointed to find yourself a person of color who looks suspicious.

Another critique might be that no one is ever in an idealized “Original Position”. It’s almost always a thought experiment… almost. There are rare occasions when a group of people get together with the explicit intention of making rules for a new group. It might be happen in business setups, sports teams, social groups, or… countries. Invaders dictating terms and rebels organizing utopias both are in the Original Position, with probably very different ideas of fairness. The more they wanted to make a fair society, the more a Veil of Ignorance would help.

While we may never be in an Original Position to create a whole society, we can solve moral questions by putting ourselves in an Original Position every day. Deciding on a fair way to treat an individual becomes much easier when we decide how to treat a generalized person in that same situation, and ONLY THEN apply that reasoning to the individual in question.

Just for example, let’s say there was some high-level government official accused of some crime. Not knowing whether you’d be the official, his political opponents, prosecutors, judges, police, voters, or importantly, the victim of the alleged crime, what would be a fair system that serves all their interests? How can/should we balance the competing goals of protecting the accused from being railroaded with the government’s legitimate need to enforce rules? Well, over 200 years ago some people grappled with just those questions, and tried to make a system of courts, juries, grand juries, and lawyers to recognize the legitimate interests of all involved. There’s a presumption of innocence for the accused, a process of inquiry established, standards of evidence and law to meet, punishments if found guilty. Now, take that general system and apply it to the accused government official. Is the government running a roughshod witch hunt over his freedoms, or are they checking every box, bending over backward to make sure their evidence is ironclad, and presenting their findings to multiple juries? Is the generic process, decided by folks in the “Original Position”, the process judged ahead of time to be fair to all, being applied evenly in this specific instance? What issues could or should call a different standard into use? Well, it’s a hypothetical, let’s hope it never comes up in reality. But the Justice-is-blind reasoning behind the Veil of Ignorance would give us a fair and unbiased starting point for consideration.

When you were a kid and had to split a cookie evenly with a friend, what was the fair way to do it? One person divided the cookie, but the other person picked. The divider, not knowing which piece they’d get, had every incentive to make the split evenly. The picker was able to take the bigger piece, if there was one. Together, their interests balanced and it came out fair. The Veil of Ignorance seems like a college-level version of that, but sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.

Unsurprisingly, we can’t cover the depth of a philosophical concept in a newsletter article, but it was interesting to us and if it’s interesting to you, we have several resources to direct you to. Enjoy!