Rawls Veil Of Ignorance Analysis

To understand why the veil of ignorance is such an important feature of Rawls’ argument, we must understand what he thought about the role of justice. He thought that justice should be the guiding principle of institutions, because only a just institution will deal fairly with the rights & liberties of its citizens. Such an institution wouldn’t bargain with a right or liberty to make itself more efficient. In this paper, I will argue that Rawl’s veil of ignorance effectively operates to prevent the formation of principles of institutions being based on particulars. In this way, Rawls creates a theory of justice that can only become more fair and more just. First of all, justice in institutions will come from certain basic powers each citizen,

For example, it is simply not rational to accept less social goods without any recompense (62). However, there are also other assumptions that are less implicit - for example, that individuals care about the well-being of some in the next generation. Perhaps Rawls would argue that this is implicit however - if injustice comes from inequalities that don’t benefit all, then future generations of humans would be included in the all. It would seem that if the next generation weren’t taken into account, that it would be just to arrange social institutions to benefit the elderly at the expense of the next generations. This brings me to a comment on Rawls’ theory - it is arranged in such a way that if there is injustice; there isn’t. What I mean to say is that the very idea of Rawls system is that it preserves fairness in the same way a deductive argument preserves the truth of it’s conclusion. Fair principles and a fair procedure guarantee a fair outcome. I am wary of this, because it prevents certain counter-schemes of argument being used. Since the pragmatics of Rawls argument are so tenuous anything shown to be practically unfair is going to be an unreal outcome for Rawls theory. What I mean to say is, it seems to be so basically logical that fairness can be preserved in the way that Rawls says it can be, that to argue otherwise seems