veil of ignorance: a standalone construct

John Rawls coined the veil of ignorance in A Theory of Justice (1971) as the central device of what he called the original position, an imagined situation for choosing the basic rules of a society. Behind the veil, the parties choosing those rules are denied all knowledge of who they will turn out to be, their social class, natural talents, sex, and even their own beliefs about what makes a life good, so that no one can shape the rules to favour their own case. Rawls had built toward the idea in his earlier article Justice as Fairness (1958), and it was anticipated by John Harsanyi (1955), who argued that a person choosing social arrangements as if any position in society were equally likely to become their own would reason impartially. What makes the construct a landmark in political philosophy is its procedural form: instead of measuring justice against an outside standard, it defines fair principles as whatever people would agree to once stripped of the information that lets self-interest bias the choice. The ordinary word veil, a cloth or membrane, and its other technical meanings in law and economics are unrelated to this device and are treated separately.[1][2][3]

Unit

A hypothetical choosing position defined by what information it withholds

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Not measured empirically in its original use; analysed as a reasoning device through philosophical argument, and probed experimentally by placing people in impartial-choice settings