The Veil of Ignorance: The Thought Experiment That Can End Any Argument

The veil of ignorance is philosopher John Rawls' method for settling arguments about fairness. Imagine designing a system without knowing which position in it you'll occupy: wealthy or poor, majority or minority, manager or employee. Any arrangement you'd accept under those conditions is just, and any arrangement you'd only accept knowing you personally benefit is, by definition, not. Rawls published it in A Theory of Justice (1971), and it remains the most widely cited framework in political philosophy.

It's also one of the most practical tools you have for ending arguments at home and at work, because it makes self-interest visible by temporarily taking it away. The veil of ignorance starts with one radical question.

Try it before you read it: the Veil of Ignorance simulator lets you write five laws for a society, then drops you into it as one of 16 randomly chosen citizens. It takes about two minutes. (Teachers: there's a free lesson plan and worksheet.)

The setup

Imagine that before you're born, you meet in a room with everyone else who will live in your future society. You don't yet know who you'll be: wealthy or poor, healthy or disabled, part of a racial majority or minority, exceptionally talented or average, male or female. You don't know your country, your class, your intelligence, or your physical attributes.

From behind this veil of ignorance, you all design the rules of society together: the tax structure, the healthcare system, the laws, the safety nets, and how resources are distributed.

Rawls argued that decisions made behind the veil would be fairer and more just than decisions made with self-knowledge, because nobody would design a system that exploits a position they might end up in.

Maximin, explained simply

What rule would people actually pick behind the veil? Rawls's answer is maximin: maximize the minimum. Judge every possible society by how its worst-off member lives, and choose the society where that worst position is best.

Think of it as choosing a lottery when you can't afford to lose. If one society gives most people a great life and leaves 10% destitute, and another gives everyone a decent life with no one destitute, maximin picks the second, because behind the veil you might be in that 10%.

This leads to Rawls's difference principle: inequality is allowed only when it makes the worst-off better off than they would be under equality. A surgeon earning more than a cashier passes the test if those higher wages mean more people get surgery, the cashier included. A tax loophole that only benefits people who are already rich doesn't.

Veil of ignorance examples

The thought experiment gets clearer when you run it on specific decisions.

Healthcare. Design a health system without knowing whether you'll be born healthy or with a chronic illness. Few people choose a system where the chronically ill can't get insurance, because there is a real chance you'd be one of them. Rawls later listed basic health care for all citizens among the requirements of a just society.

Taxes. Behind the veil you don't know whether you'll be a high earner or unemployed. Most people reject both extremes: no safety net at all is too risky, and taxing everything away removes the incentives that make the bottom position better. The answer usually lands on some form of progressive taxation with a floor.

School admissions. Would you design admissions around legacy preferences and expensive test prep if you didn't know whether your parents went to that university or could afford tutoring? The veil turns "should admissions favor X?" into "would I accept this rule from any starting point?"

AI and automation policy. You don't know if you'll own the company deploying the AI or hold the job it replaces. That uncertainty pushes most people toward transition support, retraining or some sharing of the gains, rather than leaving displaced workers to absorb the whole cost.

A household chore chart. Write the rota before anyone knows which name goes in which row. Chores tend to get split much more evenly than when each person drafts their own.

The idea is also useful well beyond policy.

The office version

Two departments are fighting over budget. Marketing wants money for a new brand campaign, and Product wants it for an infrastructure upgrade. Both teams have built airtight arguments, and each is convinced the other is selfish and short-sighted.

Now bring the veil of ignorance into the meeting room. Ask both teams: "If you didn't know which team you were on, if you might be a marketing lead or a product engineer, what budget policy would you vote for?"

The fight doesn't disappear, but the conversation changes. The argument moves from "here's why my team deserves the money" to "here's what a sensible allocation policy looks like in general."

The veil of ignorance turns adversarial negotiation into collaborative design. It swaps "What's good for me?" for "What's good in principle?"

The relationship version

Couples therapy arrived at a version of the veil of ignorance independently, without using the name. The technique goes by "role reversal" or "perspective-taking exercise," and the structure is always the same.

When a conflict gets entrenched, the therapist asks each partner to defend the other's position as if they really held it, sincerely and not sarcastically.

Most people find this brutal, because it means truly inhabiting a view you've been trying to defeat. The almost universal result is a sudden, uncomfortable recognition that the other position isn't crazy. It's internally coherent and grounded in real experiences and needs.

The veil of ignorance does at the level of systems what perspective-taking does between two people. It makes you design for a world you might have to live in from any point on the spectrum.

The hidden test of your own values

This is where the veil gets really uncomfortable: it exposes the gap between the values you state and the preferences you actually have.

Many people who believe in meritocracy, for instance, find their commitment wavers a little when asked: "If you didn't know whether you'd be born with above-average or below-average cognitive ability, if a wheel spin after this conversation would decide your intelligence, what kind of society would you design?"

The thought experiment doesn't ask you to abandon your values. It asks you to examine them where your personal interests can't contaminate the analysis. The values that survive the veil are the ones you really hold. The ones that conveniently vanish behind it were, in some subtle way, self-serving rationalizations.

That's what makes it such a good companion to avoiding binary thinking. The veil strips away the false dilemmas we build to justify positions we already hold.

The strongest objection: Harsanyi's utilitarian veil

Rawls wasn't the first to use a veil. The economist John Harsanyi published a version in 1953, and he reached the opposite conclusion. If you have an equal chance of being anyone, Harsanyi argued, the rational choice is the society with the highest average wellbeing, not the best worst case. Maximin, he said, is irrationally cautious: it would reject a society that makes everyone far better off except one person who is made slightly worse off.

Rawls's reply was that the stakes behind the veil are too high for gambling. You're choosing the basic terms of your whole life once, with no second try, so caution is the rational stance rather than a bias.

Experiments suggest real people land between the two. When Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer had groups choose distribution rules without knowing their own position, most groups picked neither pure maximin nor pure averaging, but the highest average subject to a guaranteed floor. More recently, Karen Huang, Joshua Greene and Max Bazerman found that veil-of-ignorance reasoning made people more willing to choose the option that saves the most lives in moral dilemmas, closer to Harsanyi than to Rawls.

The simulator scores your society both ways (a Rawlsian score for the worst-off citizen and a utilitarian score for the average), so you can see which side your own choices fall on. For the same tension in a different form, try the trolley problem.

The practical framework: three questions

You don't need a philosophy doctorate to run your own veil of ignorance experiment. In practice it comes down to three questions you can use in almost any high-stakes argument or design problem.

1. "If I didn't know which role I'd occupy, what policy would I vote for?" Use this for resource allocation, rule design, and organizational policy. It takes your own position out of the analysis.

2. "Would I consider this outcome fair if I didn't know which side I was on?" Use this for personal conflicts, negotiation outcomes, and performance reviews. A result is fair if a neutral observer with nothing at stake would endorse it.

3. "What would I design if I had to live with all the consequences, not just the ones I prefer?" Use this for system design, public policy, and institutional rules. The most durable systems are built under real uncertainty about who they'll affect.

What would you design if you didn't know where you'd land? Step behind the Veil of Ignorance simulator, design your society's taxes, justice, and healthcare, then spin the wheel to see which position you're born into. Most players immediately notice the gap between what they designed and what they'd have wanted.

Conclusion: the most honest question you can ask

The veil of ignorance is uncomfortable on purpose. It takes away the context that makes self-interest feel like principle. Having John Rawls' veil of ignorance explained simply forces you to face what you actually believe about fairness once your particular circumstances stop protecting you.

Rawls believed justice is what reasonable people would agree on if they truly didn't know how they'd be affected. Fifty years on, the idea has survived everything political philosophy's sharpest critics have thrown at it.

Maybe it survived because most people already grasp the intuition. You've heard the simpler version: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The veil of ignorance makes that rule rigorous enough to build a civilization on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance? The Veil of Ignorance is a thought experiment by philosopher John Rawls. It asks you to design the rules of society without knowing where you will be placed within it, stripping away your knowledge of your wealth, gender, race, or abilities to ensure true systemic fairness.

How do you use the veil of ignorance in real life? In real life, the veil of ignorance can be used to resolve disputes. Ask both parties: "If you did not know which side of this argument you would ultimately land on, what rules or outcomes would you consider fair for everyone?"

Why is the veil of ignorance important? It is important because it exposes our hidden biases. It shows that many of the things we consider "fair" or "principled" are actually just policies that happen to benefit our specific socioeconomic position.

What is an example of the veil of ignorance? Designing a healthcare system without knowing whether you'll be born healthy or with a chronic illness. Behind the veil, most people refuse a system that leaves the sick uninsured, because they might be the one who needs care. The same reasoning applies to tax rules, school admissions and how the gains from automation are shared.

What is the difference between Rawls and Harsanyi's veil of ignorance? Both imagine choosing rules without knowing your place. Rawls argued you would choose to protect the worst-off position (maximin); Harsanyi argued you would choose the highest average wellbeing, since you have an equal chance of being anyone (Harsanyi, 1953, 1975). Experiments by Frohlich and Oppenheimer found most groups chose a compromise: maximize the average with a guaranteed minimum.

Is there a veil of ignorance game or activity for students? Yes. ThynkIQ's free Veil of Ignorance simulator has students choose five laws and then be born into the society as a random citizen. A teacher guide includes a 45-minute lesson plan, discussion questions and a printable worksheet.

Sources

1. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. Original formulation of the veil of ignorance thought experiment and the difference principle.
2. Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 14(3), 223–251. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265349. Clarification of the original position and its political application.
3. Harsanyi, J. C. (1953). Cardinal utility in welfare economics and in the theory of risk-taking. Journal of Political Economy, 61(5), 434–435. https://doi.org/10.1086/257416. Precursor to Rawls; utilitarian version of the veil of ignorance argument.
4. Sandel, M. J. (2009). Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Accessible treatment of Rawls and competing theories of fairness.
5. Sunstein, C. R. (2005). Laws of fear: Beyond the precautionary principle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Applied Rawlsian reasoning to policy under uncertainty.
6. Harsanyi, J. C. (1975). Can the maximin principle serve as a basis for morality? A critique of John Rawls's theory. American Political Science Review, 69(2), 594–606. The main utilitarian objection to maximin.
7. Frohlich, N., & Oppenheimer, J. A. (1992). Choosing Justice: An Experimental Approach to Ethical Theory. University of California Press. Groups choosing behind an experimental veil mostly picked "maximize the average with a floor."
8. Huang, K., Greene, J. D., & Bazerman, M. (2019). Veil-of-ignorance reasoning favors the greater good. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(48), 23989–23995. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910125116. Veil reasoning increased support for choices that save more lives.