Want to build a fair society? John Rawls offers a brilliant perspective
John Rawls proposed a thought experiment that sounds almost childishly simple: imagine designing a society before you know what position you’ll occupy in it. You don’t know if you’ll be born wealthy or poor, healthy or disabled, brilliant or average, in the dominant culture or peripheral to it. Behind this “veil of ignorance,” what kind of society would you create?
The question feels like a parlor game until you actually try to answer it. Then it becomes uncomfortable. Most of us, if we’re honest, design our political preferences from our current position. We notice the problems that affect us, discount the ones that don’t, and convince ourselves that what benefits us happens to align with justice. The veil strips that away. It forces you to confront a different question entirely: not what kind of society rewards people like me, but what kind of society I’d be willing to enter at random.
Rawls argued you’d choose two principles. First, maximum equal liberty—everyone gets the same basic rights and freedoms. Second, inequalities are acceptable only if they benefit the less advantaged and attach to positions genuinely open to all. The first principle seems obvious until you realize how many liberties we casually trade away for convenience or security. The second principle is where things get interesting, because it inverts how we typically think about economic arrangements.
What the Veil Reveals
We usually justify economic inequality by pointing upward—these gaps are necessary to create incentives for innovation, to reward merit, to generate growth. The Rawlsian frame asks you to look downward as well: do these inequalities improve the position of whoever ends up at the bottom? Not as a side effect or trickle-down benefit, but as their primary justification. If you might be that person, you’d demand a pretty compelling answer.
This produces a completely different policy sensibility. Instead of asking whether markets are efficient—and current markets often aren’t—you ask whether they’re structuring risk fairly. Markets excel at generating wealth but they’re indifferent to how that wealth gets distributed and how the costs of failure get allocated. Someone has to absorb those costs. Behind the veil, you’d want to know: what happens to whoever draws the short straw?
Consider inherited wealth. Behind the veil, you don’t know if you’ll be born into a family with vast resources—trust funds, political connections, access to elite education and career networks—or into a family struggling paycheck to paycheck. Would you design a system where someone’s life prospects depend overwhelmingly on which family they’re born into? Where wealth compounds across generations through mechanisms that aren’t available to everyone? There’s no achievement to valorize here, no merit to reward. It’s pure genetic lottery. Yet current arrangements let fortunes accumulate and transfer largely intact, creating dynasties where descendants enjoy advantages that have nothing to do with their own talent or effort.
Or take the legal system. Behind the veil, you don’t know if you’ll have resources to hire skilled attorneys or if you’ll face the justice system with a public defender carrying hundreds of cases. You don’t know if you’ll be able to afford years of litigation to defend your rights or if you’ll have to settle because you can’t afford the fight. Everyone across the political spectrum acknowledges that wealth buys better justice—better representation, better outcomes, the ability to simply outlast opponents with fewer resources. Would you design a system where your actual legal rights depend on your bank account?
Or consider market concentration. Behind the veil, you don’t know if you’ll be a consumer facing monopoly prices, a small business competing against dominant platforms, or a worker whose wages are suppressed because a few employers control the labor market. Antitrust isn’t a partisan issue—it’s about whether markets serve everyone or just whoever’s currently winning. When a handful of corporations dominate entire sectors, they don’t just extract economic rents. They shape regulations, influence politicians, and structure markets to entrench their own advantages. Behind the veil, would you choose rules that let winners consolidate power until competition becomes impossible?
Consider corporate bankruptcy. Current law lets corporations dissolve their debts while often preserving wealth for shareholders and executives, even as suppliers and workers get pennies on the dollar. Personal bankruptcy exists, but the experience differs dramatically—years of damaged credit, assets liquidated, the social weight of having failed. That arrangement makes perfect sense if you’re designing rules from the perspective of people who own corporations. Behind the veil, it looks different. You might be the supplier who extended credit, the worker whose pension evaporates. Would you choose rules where bankruptcy protection works better for legal fictions than for actual people?
The veil of ignorance doesn’t tell you exactly what policies to choose. But it tells you what questions to ask. Not “does this system reward merit” but “does everyone actually have a fair shot at success; or do some people start so far ahead that merit barely matters, or so far behind that obstacles are unsurmountable?” Not “does this create growth” but “who captures that growth, and who bears the risks of pursuing it?” Not “is this efficient” but “efficient at what, and for whom?”
The Garden Metaphor
There’s a metaphor that captures something the veil of ignorance implies but doesn’t state directly: the economy should be a garden, not a jungle. We actually choose what kind of economic environment we create. The market isn’t natural law. It’s a system of rules we write, boundaries we set, behaviors and outcomes we permit or forbid. Calling it a jungle—suggesting it should be red in tooth and claw, that dominance and predation are its natural state—is an ideological choice masquerading as realism.
A garden economy doesn’t mean eliminating competition or difference. Gardens have tall plants and short ones, sun-lovers and shade-dwellers. But gardeners make decisions. They decide what grows and what doesn’t. They pull weeds not because weeds are morally inferior to tomatoes but because they’re growing a garden for tomatoes. They understand that left to itself, any plot eventually belongs to whatever spreads fastest and chokes out everything else. Which might be fine if you’re indifferent to what grows there. But we’re not indifferent to what our economy produces or how it distributes human welfare.
Behind the veil, you’d want an economy that’s a garden. You’d want competition, incentive and reward for talent and effort—those create the abundance that benefits everyone including the less advantaged. But you’d also want rules that prevent the strongest from simply crushing everyone else. You’d want positions of influence to actually be open to people with merit and commitment rather than inherited advantage. You’d want systems that catch people who fall rather than letting them spiral into permanent precarity. Not because you’re soft-hearted, but because you might be the one who falls.
What Changes
Taking Rawls seriously inverts the burden of proof. Instead of reformers having to justify why we should constrain markets or wealth disparities, defenders of the status quo have to justify why current arrangements would be acceptable to someone who didn’t know where they’d land. And that’s a much harder case to make than it appears.
Why should someone born into poverty face dramatically worse schools, more expensive credit, and neighborhoods saturated with environmental hazards? The usual answer is some combination of “their parents made bad choices” and “we can’t afford to fix it.” Behind the veil, neither answer works. You don’t choose your parents. And “we can’t afford it” rings somewhat hollow in the wealthiest society in human history.
Why should corporate consolidation be treated as the natural evolution of markets rather than as power accumulation requiring aggressive response? Why should we permit wealth to compound across generations through mechanisms unavailable to ordinary families? Why should we structure intellectual property, bankruptcy, and contract law in ways that consistently advantage those with capital?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. There might be good answers. But they can’t be “that’s just how markets work” or “successful people deserve what they earn.” Behind the veil, you’d demand to know: which markets? Structured by which rules? Define success in a way that doesn’t presume I’ll have advantages I might not get. Show me why this arrangement benefits whoever ends up worst off, because I might be that person.
The Practical Bite
This isn’t abstract philosophy. The Rawlsian frame produces concrete policy intuitions. You’d want automatic stabilizers that kick in during downturns without requiring political fights—because you might be the one laid off when recession hits. You’d want strong antitrust enforcement and policies that actively prevent concentration—because you might be the small business competing against dominant platforms, or a consumer forced to pay monopoly prices. You’d want limits on how much wealth can accumulate and compound across generations—because inherited fortunes mean you’re competing against people who started the race halfway to the finish line.
You’d want systems designed for resilience rather than “optimization,” because “optimization” usually means efficient extraction of value by whoever’s currently winning. You’d want multiple paths to decent lives rather than single narrow funnels through elite institutions. You’d want safety nets robust enough that bad luck, bad genes, or bad timing doesn’t permanently derail your life trajectory.
None of this requires abandoning markets or capitalism. Markets remain the best tool we’ve found for coordinating complex economic activity and spurring innovation. But behind the veil, you’d want markets that are structured gardens—deliberately cultivated and actively maintained; designed to produce broad flourishing rather than letting the strongest simply dominate. You’d want capitalism that serves democratic purposes rather than democracy that serves unending accumulation.
The veil of ignorance asks one question: what kind of society would you be willing to join at random? Everything else follows from taking that question seriously.
