By Chris Satullo
A “veil of ignorance” sounds like a bad thing, right?
In the hands of the American moral philosopher John Rawls, though, it turns into an eye-opening and perpetually useful tool for thinking about what we owe each other and what kind of nation we want to be.
I stumbled onto Rawls’ masterwork, Theory of Justice, decades ago when looking for something else on a library shelf. I pulled it down, started reading, couldn’t stop and have used it as a mental touchstone ever since.
The “veil of ignorance” is a key part of Rawls’ most famous mental experiment. Imagine a group of souls in what Rawls called the “original position”: at the outset of forming a set of rules by which they hope to create a just society – i.e., one that seeks to spread good things as widely as possible while sparing all from devastating harm.
Imagine further (think of it in terms of reincarnation, if that helps) that these pilgrim souls have the chance to put those societal rules in place before they are even born, so they’ll go on to live in a place that runs according to rules they’ve crafted.
And imagine further that they’ll do this society-building task behind a “veil of ignorance,” by which Rawls means that none of them knows how they will fare in the “birth lottery” that will place them willy-nilly into the society they’ve designed.
Let me add my own final tweak to the exercise: Also imagine that these souls are given an overview of American society today and asked: “Would this suit your wishes? If not, how would you want to tweak it before birth thrusts you at random into its grip?”
OK, ready? Now put yourself – with all that you are, hope for and believe – into this scenario.
Recall, as you survey the systems and quirks of modern America, that you would not know whether you were about to be born to a pair of high-powered attorneys on Manhattan’s East Side, or an unwed mother on Chicago’s South Side, or two gay artists in Taos, New Mexico. Or, perhaps, to an undocumented family of migrant workers in Laredo, or a proud Iowa farming clan teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
The possibilities are myriad, the consequences of a given lot either divinely sweet or devilishly dire.
You would not, for example, know whether you’d be born with a genius IQ or Down syndrome.
You would not know whether you’d be granted the athletic gifts of a LeBron James or doomed to live with spina bifida, cystic fibrosis or the sickle cell gene.
You would not know whether you’d be born into a boisterous, loving family with seven kids or the only child of an abusive addict.
You would not know whether you’d be born in a coastal town in Florida, the Carolinas, New Jersey, or California that might be under water before you get a driver’s license. Or a village in Oregon that’ll be wiped out by a wildfire before you reach middle school.
You would not know whether you’d be born a citizen living under the full protection of the Bill of Rights, or a dark-skinned immigrant forever seeking out shadows where the authorities could not find you.
You would not know whether you were destined to be educated at a posh prep school, the finest, green-swarded suburban high school, or the grimiest, most chaotic and underfunded of urban prison-pipeline factories.
Given how little you could predict about your lot in life on the other side of the veil of ignorance, might there be a few things about how we do things in America 2022 that you’d be eager to change?
Taking the last point first: For damn sure you wouldn’t want to risk the birth lottery dumping you into one of those urban or rural school systems where per-pupil spending is about half what it in an affluent ‘burb a few miles away. You might grasp quickly that the old tradition of funding schools based on local wealth is insane in a society as economically segregated as ours, making a mockery of the old ideal that education is the doorway to life-changing opportunity.
You’d also yearn to fix a system where access to quality health care is nearly as dependent on ZIP code and household income as access to quality K-12 education is.
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want the lottery to plop you into one among the vast number of American households that must navigate daily around the trapdoors to ruin labeled Accident, Injury, and Illness.
You’d surely not want to be born with so much melanin in your skin that your rights to be free from wrongful arrest, illegal search and seizure, wrongful imprisonment and cruel and unusual punishment depended on the whims of hostile police and a capricious court system.
Granted, not every conclusion that stems from a Rawls “veil of ignorance” exercise necessarily hews to a deep-blue progressive line.
A free-market spirit could certainly contend that vibrant capitalism might support public goods and protects individuals from poverty more effectively than Bernie Sanders’ fond dreams, given how that system might spur innovation, create new wealth, and generate household-supporting jobs.
But, if that Adam Smith-loving soul were honest, even he would likely want to get rid of structures that allow businesses to pawn off on their neighbors the costs of the pollution they create. Even he would likely want to abolish structures that lavish huge rewards on the people whose primary skill is concocting opaque investment vehicles that crash the global economy at regular intervals while forcing teachers and cops to take second jobs to support their families.
It’s best to deploy Rawls’ wisdom as a corrective to one’s own blind spots and dependence on ideological clichés – not merely as a cudgel to beat your usual political foes. In my decades as an opinion writer, I would return often to Rawls’ thought experiment to test both my own conventional thinking and the fresh ideas of others. If I didn’t know who I’d be in this society, would I support this plan or that proposal?
The results of an honest assessment of that key question sometimes surprised, leading me to tweak or outright change my views.
For example, it was hard to smile upon a public education system that gives desperate parents in one of those shortchanged school districts only one choice of school for their children.
Even as I now rely on Medicare myself, I feel Rawlsian qualms about a system that spends far more per capita to give the wrinkled and gray a few more days than on ensuring the health of infants and their mothers.
And, as a deft wielder of a No. 2 pencil who leveraged the test-obsessed “meritocracy” into a satisfying career and comfortable living, it took me a long time to recognize how often that same system cheats other smart, eager but less fortunately placed kids out of real opportunity.
I’d urge you to try the Rawls pre-birth lottery exercise for yourself. Then, even better and even harder, try to vote, think, and act upon what you learn about your society – and yourself.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia