The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness

Author: Shane Parrish URL: https://fs.blog/veil-ignorance/ Recommended by: Charlie Munger One-line: John Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance is a thought experiment for stress-testing any rule for fairness — if you had to design society without knowing who you’d be in it, you’d design a fair one.

Key claims

• The Veil of Ignorance is a fairness test, not a literal proposal. A component of Social Contract Theory, it asks you to design a society without knowing your own future place in it — class, sex, race, ability, personality all unknown. Because any choice could harm or benefit you, the rational choice is a fair, egalitarian one.
• Behind the veil, cognitive biases melt away. The hypothetical designers are rational, probabilistic thinkers with no group to stereotype (they might be in it) and no prior self to defend. Their only incentive — self-preservation — is identical to preserving the whole group.
• They aren’t blank slates. Rawls grants them general knowledge of science, psychology, politics, and economics (comparative advantage, supply and demand) — the “minimum viable knowledge” for rational decision-making.
• Rawls’s two components of justice: everyone gets the best possible life that harms no one else, and inequalities are permitted only when they benefit everyone.
• Ignorance can build robust structures. Illustrated by queen ants who band into stronger colonies before knowing which will survive, and by Empathy as the everyday version of the same move — imagine being the person on the receiving end.
• The practical tool: “you split, I pick.” When contemplating a moral action, imagine you don’t know whether you’ll be the doer or the receiver — Michael Shermer’s “Fairness Principle.” Applies to writing laws (abortion, benefit cuts, offshoring) and dividing the last cookie.
• It rhymes with the Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin): behind the veil, the logical choice for a shared resource is equal parts and a cap on overuse.

Notable quotes

“Because people behind the Veil of Ignorance do not know who they will be in this new society, any choice they make in structuring that society could either harm them or benefit them. … No one wants to be part of a disadvantaged group, so the logical belief is that the Veil of Ignorance would produce a fair, egalitarian society.”

“The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.” — Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc

“Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings.” — Spencer J. Maxcy, Ethical School Leadership

“Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.” — Benjamin Franklin

“What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.” — Aristotle, via N. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Microeconomics

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events… each time a man stands up for an ideal… he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.” — Robert F. Kennedy

How it connects

• Veil of Ignorance — this is the canonical explainer for the concept; the article is its primary source in the corpus.
• John Rawls — the originator (A Theory of Justice, 1971; Justice as Fairness: A Restatement).
• Charlie Munger — recommended the piece; the veil is a worldly-wisdom-style mental model for inverting a decision.
• Empathy — Kyle’s read: the veil is systematized empathy. Ties to Fred Rogers’s “I can’t imagine eating anything that had a mother” — you can’t act harshly toward someone you picture with their mother.
• Tragedy of the Commons / Garrett Hardin — the shared-resource problem the veil would solve by mandating equal shares.
• Social Contract Theory — the tradition the veil sits in, traced back through Kant, Plato’s Crito (Socrates), and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (John Proctor).
• Alexis de Tocqueville — opening epigraph on the self “sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness.”

Kyle’s notes

Kyle: The veil reminds me of Fred Rogers on why he’s a vegetarian — “I can’t imagine eating anything that had a mother.” Can you imagine acting toward anyone so harshly when you imagine them with their mother?