Rawlsian Justice and South Asian Ethical Traditions — Epoche C1
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) is the central work of twentieth-century political philosophy, and its most famous device is the veil of ignorance . The device is routinely dismissed as an elegant impossibility: no one, the critic says, can actually forget who they are, so a theory built on that pretence is an interesting but unrealistic exercise. This essay contends that the dismissal rests on a misreading of what the veil is for — and that the misreading becomes obvious when the veil is set beside a tradition that has practised something structurally similar for over two millennia. The rigorous Jain discipline of ahimsa , non-violence towards all living beings, together with the Jain doctrine that no single standpoint captures the truth, shows that the deliberate suspension of one's own position is not a philosopher's fantasy but a teachable, liveable ethical practice. What the veil of ignorance actually is Rawls's question is the oldest one in political philosophy: by what principles should the basic institutions of a society — its constitution, its property system, its arrangements for education and opportunity — be judged? His answer is a procedure. Imagine the principles being chosen in what he calls the original position : a hypothetical assembly of parties who must agree, once and for all, on the ground rules of their common life. The catch is the veil. Each party is deprived of all knowledge of the particular facts about themselves: their class and social status, their natural talents and their intelligence, their sex, their religion and their conception of what makes life worth living, even the generation into which they will be born. They retain general knowledge — economics, psychology, the fact that resources are moderately scarce — but nothing that would let them tailor the rules to their own advantage. The point of the deprivation is impartiality by construction . A person who does not know whether they will be rich or poor cannot rig the tax system for the rich; a person who does not know their own religion cannot write an established church into the constitution. Rawls argues that parties so situated would choose two principles: first, that each person is to have the most extensive set of equal basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all; second, that social and economic inequalities are permissible only if they are attached to positions open to everyone under fair equality of opportunity and — this is the celebrated difference principle — only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. The reasoning behind the second principle is a decision rule economists call maximin : when you must choose among arrangements and you do not know which position in them you will occupy, choose the arrangement whose worst position is the best available, because for all you know that worst position will be yours. Behind the veil, everyone reasons this way, and so everyone converges on institutions that take care of the bottom. The impracticality critique, stated properly The objection the essay confronts has a lay version and a philosophical version, and they should be separated. The lay version says: nobody can actually forget their identity, so the thought experiment cannot be performed, so the theory is idle. The philosophical version was given its sharpest form by Michael Sandel in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Sandel argued that the veil presupposes what he called an "unencumbered self" — a self that exists prior to, and independently of, all its attachments, commitments and communal ties, since only such a self could survive having them all veiled away. But real human beings, Sandel held, are partly constituted by their attachments: a person's membership of a family, a faith, a nation is not a removable garment but part of who they are. On this view the veil does not merely idealise; it falsifies the very nature of persons, and principles derived from a falsification carry no authority for the encumbered creatures we actually are. Rawls's own reply, developed in Political Liberalism (1993), is the hinge of this essay. The original position, he insists there, is a device of representation : it is not a claim about what selves are, nor a state anyone is supposed to enter, but a vivid way of modelling constraints we already accept. We accept — most of us, on reflection — that the justice of an institution should not depend on the bargaining power of those who set it up, and that "because it benefits me" is not a public reason for a constitutional rule. The veil simply builds those admissions into the description of a choice situation, so that whatever would be chosen there is guaranteed to honour them. To "go behind the veil" is therefore not to induce amnesia; it is to discipline one's reasoning — to refuse to let knowledge of one's own advantages function as a premise. The question the impracticality critique should really be asking is whether human beings can sustain such a discipline. And that is an empirical question about ethical practice, to which the history of South Asian ethics supplies an affirmative answer. Jainism and ahimsa: the metaphysical backdrop Jainism is one of the oldest continuously practised religious traditions of India, given its historical shape by Mahavira, a teacher of roughly the fifth century BCE and an elder contemporary of the Buddha, whom Jains count as the twenty-fourth in a line of tirthankaras , "ford-makers" who show the crossing over the river of suffering. Its ethics rests on a distinctive metaphysics, set out systematically in Umasvati's Tattvartha Sutra (composed in roughly the second to fifth century CE), the one scripture recognised by all Jain sects. Every living thing, on this account, is a jiva — a soul, a centre of experience — and souls pervade the world far beyond the animals we ordinarily notice: Jain taxonomy classifies living beings by the number of senses the