The Original Position and the Veil of Ignorance

The original position is a hypothetical situation of choice: the parties to it are rational agents selecting principles of justice for their society, but they are placed behind a "veil of ignorance" that conceals from them their natural abilities, social class, conception of the good, and even their generation. They know general facts about economics, psychology, and political theory, but they do not know where they will land.

The veil of ignorance is not a realistic description of deliberation but a device for ensuring impartiality. Principles chosen behind the veil cannot be tailored to anyone's particular advantage, because no one knows their particular situation. This gives the chosen principles their moral weight: they are fair because they were chosen from a standpoint that excludes self-interested bias.

Rawls argues that rational parties in the original position would not gamble on the utilitarian bet that the greatest aggregate welfare might compensate for their personal misery. Instead, applying the maximin rule — maximising the minimum outcome — they would choose principles that guarantee the most advantaged position for the worst-off member of society. This leads to his two principles of justice.

The original position is developed in sections 3–4 and 20–26 of A Theory of Justice. Rawls traces the idea to the social contract tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.