# Veil of Ignorance **The model:** Rawls' procedure for deriving fair political principles: imagine you must design a society's basic institutions before you know what position you will occupy in it. You don't know your race, sex, class, talents, religion, sexual orientation, era of birth, or natural endowments. From behind this veil, what rules would you choose? The intuition is that if you don't know whether you'll be the king or the serf, you'll design rules robust to *either* fate. The veil is a procedural device for filtering out self-interest at the institutional-design stage and arriving at principles that can be defended to anyone — because they were designed without knowing who that anyone would be. ## The Mechanism **Self-interest is the bias the veil neutralizes.** People asked to design fair rules from their actual position will, predictably, design rules that favor their actual position. The veil strips position information. Without it, the rules you choose are the ones you'd choose for *anyone*, which is closer to what fairness was supposed to mean. **Risk-aversion does the work.** Behind the veil, you don't know your odds of being any specific person. Rawls argues you'd choose risk-averse principles — accepting some inequality if and only if it benefits the worst-off, because you might *be* the worst-off. (This step is contested; libertarians like [[Robert Nozick]] dispute the risk-aversion assumption.) **Inversion in formal dress.** The veil is a structural cousin of [[Inversion]]. Instead of asking "what's the best society for me?", ask "what's the *worst* society I might end up in if my position were reassigned?" — and design against that. Like inversion, the cognitive payoff is decoupling reasoning from motivated self-positioning. ## KB Applications ### Anti-Discrimination as Veil-Compliant Policy Anti-discrimination law, civil-rights legislation, and disability accommodation are structurally veil-of-ignorance-compatible: they're rules you'd want regardless of which group you ended up in. The right-wing attack on these protections — anti-DEI rhetoric, the [[Long March Through the Institutions]] frame, the Wokeism panic — is structurally veil-violating: it argues for rules that benefit specific identifiable groups (white, Christian, male, native-born) over others. Naming the veil-violation is a clean defensive move because it doesn't require litigating any particular group's claims; it asks whether the rule would survive the position-blind test. ### Tax Policy and the Veil Behind the veil you don't know whether you'll be born to billionaire parents or in poverty. The risk-averse design from that position is a progressive tax structure with strong public goods provision — exactly the design the right-wing project has been dismantling for forty years through supply-side economics, tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the top decile, and the [[Supply-Side Economics]] framework's promise that this benefits everyone. The empirical record (forty years of widening inequality) suggests the supply-side promise was approximately the predictable failure mode the veil would have warned against. ### The [[Originalism]] Tension The conservative legal movement's commitment to originalism — interpret the Constitution as the framers would have — sits in awkward relation to the veil. Behind the veil, would you want a constitution interpreted by the standards of 1789 (when most of you would be enslaved, disenfranchised, or property-less, and women had no legal personality)? The veil makes the question stark: originalism is principled only if you'd accept it from any position, including the positions the 1789 framework would assign you to *outside* the polity. ### The Counter-Argument and Its Limits The serious libertarian objection (Nozick) is that the veil smuggles in distributional intuitions that beg the question. If you were behind a veil but happened to be very risk-tolerant, you might choose a winner-take-all society; nothing in the veil itself forces the risk-averse conclusion. This is a real critique — but it's a critique of Rawls' specific *use* of the veil, not the veil-as-procedure itself. The procedural value (filter out self-interest at the design stage) survives the libertarian objection even if Rawls' specific principles don't. ## Practicing the Veil 1. **Apply it to any policy debate.** Strip your knowledge of your position. Would you accept the rule if you might be the affected party rather than the protected one? 2. **Use it to test rhetoric.** When a movement's policies all run in one direction (this group wins, that group loses) and the movement claims to be operating from principle, the veil exposes the gap. 3. **Apply it to procedure as well as substance.** Behind the veil, would you want the courts to be partisan or impartial? The voting system to be gerrymandered or fair? The press to be free or captured? The veil predicts the same answers most people would give if asked directly — except that, in the moment, motivated reasoning warps their actual answers. ## See Also - [[John Rawls]] - [[A Theory of Justice]] — the canonical text - [[Inversion]] — the structural cousin - [[Equality Under Law]] — the principle the veil operationalizes - General Will — Rousseau's pre-Rawlsian attempt at the same problem