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The Veil of Ignorance
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A thought experiment introduced by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971) as a device for identifying fair principles of justice for a society's basic institutions. Rawls imagines reasoners in an original position choosing the rules that will govern their society from behind a veil of ignorance that hides from each of them their own place in that society: their class, race, sex, natural talents, and even their particular conception of what makes a life good. Denied that knowledge, Rawls argued, self-interest can no longer bias the choice toward an arrangement that happens to favor the chooser, so the principles selected under the veil, equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities arranged to benefit society's least advantaged members, can be defended as genuinely fair rather than as a rationalization for whoever happens to hold power.
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