Behind a veil of ignorance

John Rawls, an American philosopher, came up with an interesting way of thinking about justice in the early 1970s. While I was initially sceptical of Rawls’ approach, comments on this blog have forced me to rethink my position.

It seems as though most of us struggle to separate justice from self-interest (see for example comments on Puzzled). According to Rawls, the way to determine what a just society would look like would be to engage in a small mental exercise. Imagine that you were placed ‘behind a veil of ignorance’. Behind this veil, you have no idea what your station in life is, what social standing you hold, your job title, how much you earn, or for that matter, how much anyone else earns. Now imagine being asked to come up with the rules for how society will be ordered. You don’t know where you’ll fit in to the social structure you’ve proposed once the veil of ignorance is removed, so you have a big incentive to ensure that even if you end up at the bottom of this new structure, life is, at the very least, bearable.

Ralws’ thinking was what should come first in the construction of a just society, are some fundamental rights, followed by basic, ‘fair’ societal rules. By nature most of us tend towards social arrangements that benefit us the most, even if they are not particularly just or moral. For that reason, he proposed that we try to think of how we might structure society if our position in it wasn’t guaranteed. His conclusion, in his hard to read but incredibly valuable book, A Theory of Justice, was that we would opt for an egalitarian society in which inequality would only be tolerated if it was to the benefit of the least well off.

One of the challenges of living in a ‘post-religious’ society is that there is no universal moral code you can fall back on to make your arguments. Were this Iran, we could settle our differences on the basis of our various interpretations of the Qur’an. Were we living in an Ireland of the past, the Bible or the Pope’s last Easter message might carry similar weight. But in our present situation, if the ideas of Rawls and others on justice, which basically ask us to put other things before self interest - if these don’t sway us, then what are we left with? A society in which what is right is determined by the desires of those with the greatest economic and political power?

I was in a lecture yesterday in which a political scientist said, “We who live in OECD countries are the world’s aristocrats.” In terms of global economic and political power, I think he was right. Since none of us is able to really go behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance, and since justice has an annoying propensity for taking from the most well off to give to those with the least, perhaps it is little wonder self-interest trumps justice. Even on harmless blogs such as this.