Cobra Effect · Science and philosophy
The veil of ignorance
Write the rules as if you did not know which seat you would get.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:13, with a test and sources.
You are asked to design a country, and then you must live in it.
You write the rules. The taxes, the courts, the schools, who owes what to whom. There is one condition. When you are finished you will be dropped into it at random. Rich or poor, healthy or ill, and you do not get to know which.
John Rawls put that condition at the centre of a book in 1971.
A Theory of Justice asks which rules would be chosen by people who did not know their own place. No knowledge of your wealth, your talents, your religion, your health or your century. He called it the original position, behind a veil of ignorance.
The trick is that it makes fairness selfish.
Behind the veil you cannot rig the rules for yourself, because you do not know who you are. The only safe strategy is to make the worst position tolerable. You stop arguing about who deserves what and start asking what you could live with.
Rawls thought people behind the veil would choose two things.
First, the same basic liberties for everybody, with no trading them away for prosperity. Second, that unequal rewards are allowed only where they leave the worst off better than they would otherwise be. Not equal outcomes. A floor that anyone would accept before they knew their luck.
People have argued with it ever since, and the arguments are good.
John Harsanyi said a rational gambler behind the veil would bet on the average rather than guard the floor. Others say nobody can truly forget who they are, so the veil smuggles in the values of whoever is imagining it. The objections sharpened it rather than killed it.
So use it on something small this week.
Before you set a rule for a team, a family or a queue, ask how it reads from the weakest seat. Not the seat you are in. The seat you might have been given. A rule you would accept without knowing your place is usually the one worth writing.
Sources
- The Original Position, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The device set out carefully, with the arguments for and against it and the ways Rawls changed it over the years.
- A Theory of Justice, John Rawls, 1971. The book itself. Heavy going and worth it. This page gives the structure and the two principles, which is enough to decide whether to start.
- Original position, Wikipedia. A shorter tour of the veil and the objections to it, including Harsanyi on why a gambler behind the veil might bet on the average instead.
Nearby ideas
- The trolley problem. Why harm that follows from a plan feels different from harm that is the plan.
- The prisoner’s dilemma. Why two sensible people can both choose the worst outcome.
- Inversion. To find the path to success, first ask what would guarantee failure.
- Pascal’s wager. When a small cost seems to buy protection from an endless loss.
- Kuhn’s paradigm shifts. How science changes, not step by step, but by revolution.
- Galileo’s ship. Why you cannot feel steady motion from the inside.
- Eratosthenes measures the Earth. How a shadow and some arithmetic measured the size of the Earth.
- The sorites paradox. Vague words have no edges, but rules force them to have one.