The Blindfold That Builds Fair Rules

John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and how not knowing who you’ll be makes better politics

A city council once tried a strange experiment. Before debating bus fares and school zoning, members put on identical name tags with no titles—no “Mayor,” no “Doctor,” no “Homeowner.” For an hour they had to argue as if they might be anybody in town: a retiree on a fixed income, a new immigrant, a single parent working nights. The proposals that survived were plain and sturdy—free transfers, later library hours, safer crosswalks. The meeting ended, the titles returned, and some pet projects came back, too. But the experiment stuck. It felt like a glimpse of a fairer way to choose the rules.

That, in essence, is John Rawls’s big bet. Rawls—the soft‑spoken Harvard philosopher and World War II veteran who distrusted grandstanding—spent decades on one question: What rules could free and equal people all reasonably accept? He pictured not a heroic ruler or a wise tribunal, but ordinary citizens negotiating behind a cognitive curtain: the “veil of ignorance.”¹

Imagine you’re asked to design society, but before the meeting begins, you forget everything about yourself—your wealth, race, health, talents, family, even your generation. You still know general facts about psychology and economics, but not your personal lottery ticket. Rawls writes of these choosers: “They do not know their place in society, their class position or social status.”¹ The point isn’t amnesia for drama’s sake; it’s a device to block special pleading. If you might wake up as the janitor, not the CEO, you’ll hedge.

From that “original position,” Rawls argues, most of us would agree to two principles. First, a strong guarantee of equal basic liberties—speech, conscience, due process—non‑negotiables that don’t get traded for higher GDP. Second, we’d allow inequalities only if they’re attached to open positions and genuinely improve the lot of the least advantaged—the famous “difference principle.”² Think of a cake at a children’s party: one child cuts, another chooses first. Because the cutter doesn’t know which slice she’ll get, she cuts carefully. The veil of ignorance scales that intuition up from cake to constitutions.

But does the idea survive impact with real life? Consider organ transplants. In the early 2000s, U.S. policymakers shifted away from rules that effectively rewarded time spent on a waiting list—rules that advantaged patients with resources to get listed early—and toward medical-need scores that prioritized the sickest compatible patients, regardless of fame or fortune.⁴ No system is flawless, and trade‑offs remain (sickest‑first can shorten total life‑years saved), but the redesign tried to answer a Rawlsian question: Would I endorse this rule not knowing whether I’m the well‑insured patient who can travel, the rural patient far from a transplant center, or the one whose condition deteriorates fastest?

Other stress tests recur: school admissions lotteries to prevent queue‑jumping; disability accommodations that raise costs yet expand equal opportunity; catastrophic insurance caps that protect families from ruin. Rawls doesn’t dictate a single answer, but he gives a stance: build institutions as if you could be anyone at all. That stance also disciplines our rhetoric. It’s easy to defend a tax break “for small businesses” when you own one, or to call for austerity when you’re insulated from cuts. It’s harder to defend policies that you’d fear if you landed on the bottom rung.

Critics push back. Libertarians argue the veil smuggles in a preference for equality by framing choice as risk‑averse; utilitarians say we should maximize total happiness even if some lose out; multicultural theorists worry that a thin, abstract chooser erases real histories of domination. Rawls answers partly with incentives and pluralism. Inequality can be justified—bonuses, patents, and profits are fine—if, on net, they pull up the worst‑off. And the basic liberties are designed to protect diverse life plans, not homogenize them.³ The veil isn’t a blueprint; it’s a fairness filter.

So what? Here’s a three‑step mental model you can use the next time a headline promises “reform,” whether about housing, AI, or healthcare:

1) Blindfold first. Before you take a position, write two sentences in which you might be the person least likely to benefit. Do your reasons still hold if you turn out to be them?

2) Name the floor. What’s the minimum set of basic liberties and material guarantees below which no one should fall? Argue about the level, but fix the idea that the floor is not for “others”—it’s for a possible future you.

3) Check the ladder. If a policy creates inequality, what’s the mechanism by which it improves the worst‑off—lower prices via innovation, better jobs via investment, faster cures via research? If that mechanism is hand‑wavy, redesign.

Rawls called justice “the first virtue of social institutions,” not a luxury add‑on after growth.¹ The veil’s genius is moral humility weaponized: a simple, almost childlike rule—decide without knowing who you’ll be—that can puncture our favorite exceptions. In a world of policy built for someone else’s cousin, it asks us to cut the cake as if we might eat last.