In college I took a course on justice. We considered the meaning of justice and competing theories about what is good, what is right, and how we would like society to be structured. I learned about one concept in that course that struck me at the time, and has stayed with me for many years as a core element of my approach for thinking about society: the veil of ignorance by John Rawls.

The basic idea is that if we are going to design our ideal society and think about things like how we would want wealth to be distributed among our citizens, we need to do it objectively. In other words, we can’t think about what would be good for ourselves, we need to think about the bigger picture and all the members of society. Rawls describes this by saying that when we make these decisions, we need to do so while standing behind “a veil of ignorance.” This means that we need to design the system not knowing what position we would have in that society. For example, we might think about the desired distribution of wealth and consider two alternatives: one in which everyone has roughly equal wealth, and one more like our own in which there are very large differences. If we know we are going to be in the top 1%, we might prefer the latter structure. But what if we don’t know where we would be in society? If there was a significant chance we would be in the bottom 25% of wealth, would we still want a society in which the wealthy are very well off but the poor really struggle, or would we prefer a more equitable structure?

Rawls says we need to stand behind the veil of ignorance when we consider questions like this, and I think this is critically important. It’s also very hard to do. But I think it’s the only way for us to make effective and honest decisions about what kind of society would be best for us and our fellow citizens. I think this concept is related to another metric of the health of a civilization: how well off is the least-well-off citizen? In the U.S. we often celebrate our democracy, our capitalist economy, and our “exceptionalism,” but using this metric we don’t look as good as I think we should aspire to be.

See more about the veil of ignorance here.