Design a society without knowing who you'd be in it

Imagine you must write the rules for a whole society — but before you're born into it, a curtain drops. You don't know whether you'll be rich or poor, healthy or sick, talented or struggling, part of a majority or a persecuted minority. What rules would you choose now, blind to your own fate? This thought experiment is called the veil of ignorance, and philosopher John Rawls introduced it in 1971 to answer one of philosophy's oldest questions: what makes a society just?

Rawls argued that reasoning from behind the veil strips away self-interest and bias. Since you might end up at the very bottom, you'd rationally avoid gambling on cruelty or extreme inequality — you'd want a floor of fairness that protects even the worst-off. From this fair starting position (Rawls called it the original position), he claimed people would choose principles guaranteeing basic liberties for all, plus a rule that inequalities are only acceptable if they benefit the least advantaged.

The power of the idea is that it turns fairness into a test of impartiality: a just rule is one you'd accept even if you didn't know which side of it you'd land on. Critics push back — maybe some people would happily gamble, or maybe the veil hides too much of what makes us who we are. But as a tool for checking our own hidden self-interest, it remains one of the most quietly radical ideas in modern political philosophy.