Original position

Based on Wikipedia: Original position

The Greatest Thought Experiment You've Never Heard Of

Imagine you're about to be born into a society, but you don't know who you'll be. You might be a billionaire's heir or a child in poverty. You could be born with a disability or become president. You might be any race, any gender, any religion—or none at all. Now, with absolutely no idea which life awaits you, design the rules of society.

This is the original position.

It's a philosophical thought experiment that strips away every advantage and disadvantage you've ever known, forcing you to think about fairness from a place of profound uncertainty. And when you take it seriously, it changes how you think about everything from tax policy to civil rights.

The Veil of Ignorance

The American philosopher John Rawls, in his landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice, gave this concept its most famous formulation. He imagined people choosing the principles that would govern their society from behind what he called a "veil of ignorance."

Behind this veil, you know nothing about yourself. Not your intelligence. Not your family wealth. Not your natural talents or disabilities. Not your race or gender. Not even your conception of what makes life worth living. You are, in effect, a rational ghost trying to design a world you'll soon inhabit as a flesh-and-blood person—you just don't know which person.

The veil isn't meant to describe a real situation. No one actually experiences this kind of cosmic amnesia before birth. Instead, it's a tool for moral reasoning. By stripping away the particulars of our lives, Rawls believed we could discover principles of justice that anyone could accept, regardless of their circumstances.

Think of it this way: if you knew you'd be wealthy, you might favor low taxes and minimal welfare programs. If you knew you'd be poor, you'd probably want robust social safety nets. But if you genuinely didn't know? You'd have to think carefully about what kind of society could work for everyone.

An Idea with Many Parents

Though Rawls coined the specific terms "original position" and "veil of ignorance," the underlying idea has a long philosophical pedigree. The Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote about an "impartial spectator"—an imaginary observer who could judge moral questions without personal bias. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant developed elaborate arguments about what principles rational beings could universally accept. The British utilitarian John Stuart Mill explored similar territory.

Even before Rawls published his masterwork, two economists had independently formalized similar ideas. William Vickrey, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and John Harsanyi both developed mathematical proofs about how rational people would choose if they didn't know their place in society. Interestingly, they reached a different conclusion than Rawls would.

This disagreement reveals something important: the original position is a framework for thinking, not a machine that produces one predetermined answer.

What Would You Choose?

Rawls argued that people behind the veil of ignorance would select two fundamental principles.

First, everyone would be guaranteed a comprehensive set of basic liberties—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote, protection from arbitrary arrest—and these liberties would be equal for all citizens. This seems almost obvious. Why would you gamble on limiting anyone's freedom when that limited person might turn out to be you?

The second principle is more controversial. Rawls called part of it the "difference principle," and it goes like this: social and economic inequalities are only acceptable if they benefit the least advantaged members of society.

Let that sink in. Rawls wasn't arguing for perfect equality. He accepted that some people would have more money, power, or status than others. But he believed that behind the veil, we would only accept these inequalities if they somehow improved the lot of those at the bottom.

Consider a simple example. Suppose paying doctors more than janitors attracts talented people to medicine, and this ultimately improves healthcare for everyone, including the poorest citizens. That inequality might be acceptable under Rawls's framework. But an inequality that only benefits those already on top? That wouldn't pass the test.

The Psychology of Not Knowing

Rawls's argument hinges on a psychological claim: that people in the original position would be profoundly risk-averse. They would think, "I might end up as the worst-off person in society, so I'd better make sure that position is as good as possible."

This reasoning leads to what game theorists call "maximin"—maximizing the minimum outcome. Instead of trying to create a society where you could potentially become fabulously wealthy, you'd focus on making sure the floor isn't too low. It's like choosing between two lotteries: one where you might win millions but might also starve, and another where the worst outcome is modest comfort. Behind the veil, Rawls believed, everyone would choose the second lottery.

But is this actually how people would think?

Some critics argue that Rawls's extreme risk aversion doesn't reflect how rational people actually behave. John Harsanyi, using expected utility theory—the mathematical framework economists use to model rational decision-making—showed that behind the veil, people might instead choose to maximize average well-being across society, even if this meant some chance of landing in a worse position.

The difference is subtle but crucial. Rawls's approach says: make the worst position as good as possible. Harsanyi's says: make the average position as good as possible. These can lead to very different policy conclusions.

When Theory Meets the Lab

In 1987, researchers Norman Frohlich, Joe Oppenheimer, and Cheryl Eavey decided to test Rawls's theory empirically. They put American university students in a simulated original position and asked them to choose principles for distributing resources.

The results surprised the philosophical establishment.

Given the choice, participants didn't favor Rawls's maximin approach—maximizing the welfare of the worst-off. That option was by far the least popular, chosen by fewer than five percent of participants. Instead, most preferred a compromise: maximize average well-being, but guarantee a minimum floor that no one could fall below.

This "constrained maximization" approach has intuitive appeal. It says we should try to make society as prosperous as possible overall, but we should also ensure that no one faces destitution. It's neither pure egalitarianism nor pure utilitarianism—it's a blend that apparently reflects how real people think about fairness when they don't know their place in the social order.

The Libertarian Objection

The philosopher Robert Nozick, in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, offered a different kind of challenge to Rawls. He was willing to accept the original position as a fair starting point. Fine, he said, let people begin from equality behind the veil. But what happens next?

If people freely exchange goods and services, some will end up with more than others. A talented musician might grow wealthy selling albums. An entrepreneur might build a successful business. These inequalities emerge not from theft or coercion but from voluntary transactions between consenting adults.

Nozick argued that such inequalities are perfectly just, even if they don't benefit the least advantaged. And any attempt to redistribute wealth to restore equality—through taxation, for instance—actually violates people's liberty. It treats their earnings as social property to be allocated according to some collective goal, rather than as something they've rightfully earned.

This creates a deep tension. Rawls emphasized the importance of equality and the position of the worst-off. Nozick emphasized individual liberty and property rights. Both values seem important, but they can pull in opposite directions.

Can We Really Forget Who We Are?

The philosopher Michael Sandel raised a more fundamental objection in his 1982 book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. He questioned whether the veil of ignorance is even coherent as a thought experiment.

Think about what Rawls is asking you to do: imagine yourself without your beliefs, values, talents, relationships, or history. But is there anything left? Can you really separate the "you" who makes choices from everything that makes you who you are?

Sandel argued that we are not, as Rawls's framework seems to assume, abstract rational agents who happen to have various characteristics attached to us. We are constituted by our commitments, our communities, our histories. A devout Catholic, for instance, doesn't just happen to hold certain beliefs—those beliefs are part of who she is. Asking her to reason as if she didn't have them might be asking her to become someone else entirely.

This "communitarian" critique suggests that the original position, far from revealing universal principles of justice, actually smuggles in a particular liberal conception of the self—one that not everyone shares.

The Veil Is Real

Harold Anthony Lloyd, a philosopher and law professor, offered a fascinating twist on this debate. He argued that the veil of ignorance isn't hypothetical at all—it's the human condition.

We genuinely don't know our futures. The healthy person who dismisses universal healthcare might develop cancer next year. The wealthy investor confident in his talents might lose everything in the next market crash. The person who opposes immigration might have grandchildren who marry immigrants. None of us can see what's coming.

Lloyd suggests that once we recognize this genuine uncertainty, careful self-interest starts to look a lot like altruism. If you don't know whether you'll need help someday, supporting robust social safety nets isn't just ethical—it's prudent. Insurance against life's uncertainties benefits everyone, including the currently privileged.

This pragmatic argument might appeal to people unmoved by abstract philosophical reasoning. You don't need to imagine an original position before birth. You just need to honestly acknowledge how little any of us knows about what tomorrow holds.

Beyond the Nation

In his later work The Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls extended the original position to questions of international justice. He imagined representatives of different societies—"peoples," in his terminology—choosing principles for how liberal democratic nations should relate to each other and to non-liberal societies.

This second application of the original position raises new questions. Should we imagine a global veil of ignorance where we don't know which country we'll be born into? That might suggest much more radical redistribution from wealthy nations to poor ones. But Rawls was surprisingly conservative here, arguing for only modest duties of assistance to struggling societies.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel has explored the tension between original and actual positions in international contexts. When we negotiate as actual nations with real interests, we can't simply pretend we don't know who we are. The challenge is finding ways to honor the insights of the original position while acknowledging the realities of the actual one.

The Enduring Power of the Idea

Despite decades of criticism and refinement, the original position remains one of the most influential concepts in contemporary political philosophy. Its power lies not in producing definitive answers but in structuring how we think about fairness.

When we debate tax policy, healthcare, education, or immigration, we're implicitly taking positions on what rules we'd accept behind the veil. Would we risk a society with no safety net, hoping we'd end up among the successful? Would we accept limits on liberty to ensure greater equality? Would we gamble on a world of radical inequality if the payoff for winning was high enough?

The original position doesn't tell us the right answers to these questions. But it does suggest a powerful method: try to think about justice from a position where you don't already know what serves your interests. Imagine you could be anyone. Then ask yourself what kind of society you'd build.

That's harder than it sounds. We are deeply attached to our actual positions, and it takes real effort to set them aside even momentarily. But the attempt itself is valuable. It forces us to consider perspectives we might otherwise ignore and to justify our principles to those who don't share our advantages.

In a world where political debate increasingly resembles tribal warfare—where we advocate for our group against other groups—the original position offers something different. It asks us to step back and imagine a world we'd accept even if we didn't know which tribe we'd belong to.

That's not a complete theory of justice. But it's a good place to start.