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  2. Philosopher John Rawls suggests that we should imagine we sit behind a veil of ignorance that keeps us from knowing who we are and identifying with our personal circumstances. By being ignorant of our circumstances, we can more objectively consider how societies should operate.

    • The Principles of Justice
    • Criticisms
    • Conclusion
    • Citation and Use

    Imagine that you find yourself behind the Veil of Ignorance. You might want to make sure that your life will go well. If you had to design a good life for yourself, you’d go for the specific things you care about. But behind the Veil you don’t know those specifics; you only know things that generally make people’s lives go well. Rawls calls these ‘...

    As with any influential philosopher, Rawls has been the subject of much criticism and disagreement. In this final section, we consider three objections to Rawls’s reasoning around the Veil of Ignorance.

    The three criticisms outlined above all take issue, in different ways, with Rawls’s idealisation away from the real world. Much of the value of Rawls’s work will depend on whether it is useful to construct ideal views of justice before, or at the same time as, thinking about the messier real world. Even a pessimistic conclusion on this issue, thoug...

    This reading was taken from the following work. Davies, Ben. “John Rawls and the ‘Veil of Ignorance.’” In Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource, 92–97. Golden West College, Huntington Beach, CA: NGE Far Press, 2019. This work released under a CC-BY license.

    • Ben Davies
    • 2019
  3. Dec 20, 2008 · Rawlss original position with its “thick” veil of ignorance represents a different conception of impartiality than the utilitarian requirement that equal consideration be given to everyone’s desires, preferences, or interests.

    • On John Rawls. Once a devout Christian on the path to priesthood, the horrors of the Second World War plunged John Rawls into liberalism. Rawls was born in the United States and enrolled in Kent School, which prepared students for priesthood.
    • Social Contract Theory. In the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempted to scrutinize and justify the existence of an organized government by comparing it to the “state of nature.”
    • Justice as Fairness. Rawls’ version of liberalism is an egalitarian one, based on the use of justice to resolve the conflict between freedom and equality, or—more concretely put—between individual liberty and state intervention.
    • Original Position. Widely acclaimed as a thought experiment, the Original Position is a precondition for Rawls’ justice as fairness. Rawls imagines that his justice would have been conceived in the “state of nature,” the state before any social contracts had been entered into.
  4. The original position (OP), often referred to as the veil of ignorance, is a thought experiment used for reasoning about the principles that should structure a society based on mutual dependence. The phrases original position and veil of ignorance were coined by the American philosopher John Rawls , [1] but the thought experiment itself was ...

  5. Mar 10, 2021 · The "veil of ignorance" is a method of determining the morality of political issues proposed in 1971 by American philosopher John Rawls in his "original position" political philosophy. It is based upon the following thought experiment: people making political decisions imagine that they know nothing about the particular talents, abilities ...

  6. John Rawlss Veil of Ignorance is probably one of the most influential philosophical ideas of the 20 th century. The Veil of Ignorance is a way of working out the basic institutions and structures of a just society.

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