The Original Position
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, but the thought experiment itself was developed by William Vickrey and John Harsanyi in
earlier writings.
In the original position, you are asked to consider which principles you would select for the basic
structure of society, but you must select as if you had no knowledge ahead of time what position
you would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a "veil of ignorance",
which prevents you from knowing your ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially in Rawls'
formulation, your or anyone else's idea of how to lead a good life. Ideally, this would force
participants to select principles impartially and rationally.
In Rawls's theory the original position plays the same role that the "state of nature" does in the
social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Locke. The original
position figures prominently in Rawls's 1971 book, A Theory of Justice. It has influenced a variety
of thinkers from a broad spectrum of philosophical orientations.
Rawls specifies that the parties in the original position are concerned only with citizens' share of
what he calls primary social goods, which include basic rights as well as economic and social
advantages. Rawls also argues that the representatives in the original position would adopt the
maximin rule as their principle for evaluating the choices before them. Borrowed from game
theory, maximin stands for maximizing the minimum, i.e., making the choice that produces the
highest payoff for the least advantaged position. Thus, maximin in the original position represents
a formulation of social equality.
Rawls argues that the representative parties in the original position would select two principles of
justice:
1. Each citizen is guaranteed a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties, which is compatible
with the same scheme of liberties for all others;
2. Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions:
i.
To the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle);
ii.
Attached to positions and offices open to all.
The reason that the least well off member gets benefited is that it is argued that under the veil of
ignorance people will act as if they were risk-averse. The original position is a unique and
irrevocable choice about all the most important social goods, and they do not know the probability
they will become any particular member of society. As insurance against the worst possible
outcome, they will pick rules that maximize the benefits given to the minimum outcome
(maximin).
Recently, Thomas Nagel has elaborated on the concept of original position, arguing that social
ethics should be built taking into account the tension between original and actual positions.
Recently, the original position has been modeled mathematically along Wright-Fisher's diffusion,
classical in population genetics. The original position has also been used as an argument for
negative eugenics, though Rawls' argument was limited to its use as a preventative measure.
Criticisms
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues that, while the original position may be the
just starting point, any inequalities derived from that distribution by means of free exchange are
equally just, and that any re-distributive tax is an infringement on people's liberty. He also argues
that Rawls's application of the maximin rule to the original position is risk aversion taken to its
extreme, and is therefore unsuitable even to those behind the veil of ignorance.
In How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time, Iain King argues that people in the
original position should not be risk-averse, leading them to adopt the Help Principle (Help
someone if your help is worth more to them than it is to you) rather than maximin.
In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Michael Sandel has criticized Rawls's notion of a veil of
ignorance, pointing out that it is impossible, for an individual, to completely prescind from beliefs
and convictions (from the Me ultimately), as is required by Rawls's thought experiment. More
recently, the psychological implausibility of Rawls's theory has been highlighted using possible
worlds, in a paper that stresses some problematic points of Rawls's proposal.[original research?]
In the empirical research study, Frohlich, Oppenheimer and Eavey have shown that in a simulated
original position, persons throughout a variety of temporal and cultural settings unanimously
agreed upon a distributive principle that (in great majority) maximizes the average with a specified
floor constraint (a minimum for the worst-off in any given distribution). The finding that a much
less demanding distributive principle of justice is agreed upon in a (simulated) original position
than Rawls' specification of the "difference principle", implies that the (rational) resistance to a
cosmopolitan application of justice as fairness could be less forceful than its critics imagine.
One question to note is; can man ever be alienated from his past knowledge? At the point of making
decisions, is it possible for man to forget his gender, ethnicity, past, complexion etc. This poses a
very threatening question to this theory. Thus, there cannot be a point where the veil of ignorance
can be obtainable. This theory or concept is thus an abstract theory that cannot be applied
practically to the political field.