Consequentialism within Rawls's Veil of Ignorance — Epoche C1
The Device and the Conventional Reading John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) revived the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant — the idea that principles of political morality are those that free persons could agree to — but with a decisive modernisation. Instead of imagining a historical bargain, Rawls asks what principles would be chosen in a purely hypothetical situation he calls the 'original position': a meeting of rational agents who must select the ground rules for their society's basic institutions. The famous feature of this meeting is the 'veil of ignorance'. Each party is deprived of all knowledge of who, in particular, she will be: her social class, her wealth, her natural talents, her race and sex, her psychological temperament, even her 'conception of the good' — Rawls's term for a person's considered view of what makes life worth living, whether piety, achievement, pleasure or family. Whatever principles such radically de-individualised choosers would agree on, Rawls argues, are fair, precisely because nobody could tilt the rules towards her own case. He contends they would choose two principles: first, equal basic liberties for all; second, that social and economic inequalities are permissible only when attached to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity and — the celebrated 'difference principle' — only when they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. The conventional understanding places this construction squarely against consequentialism. Some vocabulary, since these labels carry the argument: a consequentialist theory holds that the rightness of an act or institution is determined solely by the goodness of its outcomes; utilitarianism is the classic consequentialist theory, which measures goodness as aggregate welfare or 'utility' — the sum (or average) of how well everyone's life goes; a deontological theory holds that some acts are right or wrong in themselves, whatever their outcomes; and a contractualist theory grounds rightness in what parties could agree to. On the conventional reading, the veil strictly precludes consequentialist reasoning: the parties are presumed to lack the specific knowledge needed to calculate utility outcomes, and the whole apparatus was, after all, advertised by Rawls himself as an alternative to utilitarianism, which he accused of ignoring 'the distinction between persons' — of letting one person's losses be paid for by another's gains as if society were a single body. A closer examination of the veil's informational strictures, however, reveals a more nuanced reality: far from excluding consequentialism, the device may in fact compel a form of utilitarian calculation, and Rawls can prevent that outcome only by deliberate and contestable interventions in the design. What the Veil Hides and What It Leaves Visible The veil is not total darkness. While it deprives the parties of everything particular — status, talents, psychology, conception of the good — it deliberately leaves them the general laws and findings of human psychology, sociology, economics and political science. They know that people respond to incentives, that scarcity is permanent, that institutions shape character, that unchecked power tends to be abused. This limited but crucial information is precisely what enables rational choice at all: principles are being chosen for a real human society, and a chooser who knew nothing of how societies work could not rank one set of institutions above another. Consider the ancient Chinese adage from Sunzi's Art of War : 知己知彼，百战不殆 ( zhī jǐ zhī bǐ, bǎi zhàn bù dài ) — 'know yourself and know your enemy, and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril'. The veil obscures 'self' completely, but it leaves 'the enemy' — the general conditions and failure modes of human society — largely visible. The enemy here is not an adversary but the standing possibility of societal dysfunction: tyranny, destitution, instability. The parties' entire deliberation consists of studying how alternative rule-sets fare against that enemy. And that is already the first sign of the essay's thesis: a deliberation conducted wholly in terms of how institutions will turn out for their occupants is, in structure, an evaluation of consequences. Decision Theory Behind the Veil To make the structure exact, we need a small amount of decision theory — the study of rational choice, which distinguishes choice under risk , where the probabilities of outcomes are known, from choice under uncertainty , where they are not (a distinction classically drawn by Frank Knight in 1921). The standard rule for choice under risk is to maximise expected utility : if an option leads to outcome $i$ with probability $p_i$ and that outcome is worth $u_i$ to you, the option's value is the probability-weighted average $\sum_i p_i u_i$, and rationality means picking the option with the highest such average. The standard conservative rule for choice under complete uncertainty is maximin : ignore probabilities, look only at each option's worst possible outcome, and choose the option whose worst outcome is least bad. The two rules can disagree sharply. Suppose the parties must choose between two simple societies, each with two social positions a citizen is equally likely to occupy, with lifetime well-being in arbitrary units: Rule Society A: positions worth 30 and 40 Society B: positions worth 10 and 90 Verdict Expected utility (equal chances) $\tfrac{1}{2}(30)+\tfrac{1}{2}(40)=35$ $\tfrac{1}{2}(10)+\tfrac{1}{2}(90)=50$ Choose B Maximin (compare worst positions) worst $=30$ worst $=10$ Choose A Society B offers the higher average, bought at the price of a miserable bottom position; Society A protects the floor. Which rule the parties use therefore decides, almost by itself, whether the original position generates utilitarianism or something like Rawls's principles. Rawls argues (in §26 of A Theory of Justice ) that t