THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE VIOLATES PRIORITY

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi's model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting objective comparisons among persons. In order to do so, we introduce the concept of objective empathy. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin's, when modelled formally, recommend wealth allocations in conflict with the prominently espoused view that priority should be given to the less able in wealth allocation. We finally argue that the veil of ignorance should be rejected as a tool for discovering what justice requires.

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Stakeholder Fairness Under an Induced ‘Veil of Ignorance'

International Journal of Strategic Decision Sciences ◽

10.4018/ijsds.2019010105 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 65-81 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Sumit Sarkar ◽

Soumyakanti Chakraborty

Keyword(s):

Discrete Choice ◽

Expected Utility ◽

John Rawls ◽

Status Quo ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

Maximin Principle ◽

Nash Demand Game ◽

The Veil ◽

John Harsanyi ◽

Simultaneous Move

John Rawls introduced the ‘veil of ignorance' in social contract theory to bring about a common conception of justice, and hypothesized that it will enable rational individuals to choose distributive shares on basis of ‘maximin' principle. R. E. Freeman conceptualised stakeholder fairness using the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance'. In contrast to Rawls' theory, John Harsanyi postulated that rational individuals behind the ‘veil of ignorance' will choose allocation to maximise expected utility. This article investigates how subjects choose allocations behind the ‘veil of ignorance,' in a laboratory experiment, and interprets the findings in light of stakeholder fairness. The ‘veil of ignorance' was induced on randomly paired and mutually anonymous subjects, who were asked to choose allocations in a simultaneous move discrete choice Nash demand game. Both ‘maximin' principle and expected utility maximisation was found to be used by the subjects. Choice of allocations where no one is worse off vis-à-vis status quo was salient. This is consistent with Freeman's Principle of Governance.

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SOCIAL JUSTICE, GENOMIC JUSTICE AND THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE: HARSANYI MEETS MENDEL

Economics and Philosophy ◽

10.1017/s0266267112000119 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 28 (1) ◽

pp. 43-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Samir Okasha

Keyword(s):

John Rawls ◽

Evolutionary Biology ◽

Thought Experiment ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

Mendelian Genetics ◽

Division Process ◽

Impartial Observer ◽

The Veil ◽

John Harsanyi ◽

Shed Light

John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his ‘impartial observer theorem’, Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproducing organisms produce gametes, the chromosome number is halved; when meiosis is fair, each gene has only a fifty percent chance of making it into any gamete. This creates a Mendelian veil of ignorance, which has the effect of aligning the interests of all the genes in an organism. This paper shows how Harsanyi's version of the veil-of-ignorance argument can shed light on Mendelian genetics. There turns out to be an intriguing biological analogue of the impartial observer theorem that is immune from the Sen/Weymark objections to Harsanyi's original.

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John Rawls through Herman Dooyeweerd

Revista Summae Sapientiae ◽

10.53021/summaesapientiae.v2i2.63 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Gabriel Medeiros do Nascimento

Keyword(s):

John Rawls ◽

Political Discourse ◽

Human Being ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

The Public ◽

The Veil ◽

Broad Interpretation ◽

The Individual ◽

The Right ◽

Do So

This paper, by the means of a bibliographical review, aims to debate the due place of religion on political discourse. In order to do so, John Rawls’ works and propositions towards a political discourse built without the influence of religion is going to be critically read through the perspective of the Cosmonomical Philosophy, defended by Herman Dooyeweerd. The center of the debate is the human self, and what is the source of the unseen commitments that all theoretical currents have. John Rawls defends that it’s possible for a human being to be striped away of its contingencies and properties and still function correctly in the public arena. It’s the veil of ignorance proposition, which states that inside every human being lies it’s reason applied to a retributive notion of justice. On the other hand, Herman Dooyeweerd asserts that reason is not the source of political human activity, but religion is, since the human self is deeply and essentially religious. According to Herman Dooyeweerd, the human self is built around it’s Origin, and only it’s Origin is able to give meaning to the individual. That being said, after the ontological and epistemological debates, this work proposes a broad interpretation to the eighteenth article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, guaranteeing the right of every parliamentarian that professes a religious creed to express its political opinion based on said creed.

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Lifting the Veil of Ignorance: Toward a Culturally Conscious Account of Human Rights for Women in Post-September 11 America

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.667463 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Catherine Powell

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

September 11 ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

The Veil ◽

Post September 11

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The Veil of Bureaucracy: How Officials Evade Partisan Politics in Participatory Settings

Social Currents ◽

10.1177/23294965211028846 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 232949652110288

Author(s):

Meaghan Stiman

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Political Ideology ◽

Partisan Politics ◽

Community Voice ◽

Political Debates ◽

Local Decision ◽

Decision Making Processes ◽

The Veil ◽

Local Decision Making ◽

Do So

In theory, participatory democracies are thought to empower citizens in local decision-making processes. However, in practice, community voice is rarely representative, and even in cases of equal representation, citizens are often disempowered through bureaucratic processes. Drawing on the case of a firearm discharge debate from a rural county’s municipal meetings in Virginia, I extend research about how power operates in participatory settings. Partisan political ideology fueled the debate amongst constituents in expected ways, wherein citizens engaged collectivist and individualist frames to sway the county municipal board ( Celinska 2007 ). However, it was a third frame that ultimately explains the ordinance’s repeal: the bureaucratic frame, an ideological orientation to participatory processes that defers decision-making to disembodied abstract rules and procedures. This frame derives its power from its depoliticization potential, allowing bureaucrats to evade contentious political debates. Whoever is best able to wield this frame not only depoliticizes the debate to gain rationalized legitimacy but can do so in such a way to favor a partisan agenda. This study advances gun research and participatory democracy research by analyzing how the bureaucratic frame, which veils partisanship, offers an alternative political possibility for elected officials, community leaders, and citizens to adjudicate partisan debates.

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Habermas on Rawls and the normative foundations of democracy

European Journal of Social Theory ◽

10.1177/1368431020985416 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 136843102098541

Author(s):

Krzysztof Kędziora

Keyword(s):

Political Philosophy ◽

John Rawls ◽

Political Liberalism ◽

Point Of View ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

Normative Foundation ◽

Internal Relations ◽

The Veil ◽

Politics And Law ◽

Normative Foundations

The debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concerns the question of how to do political philosophy under conditions of cultural pluralism, if the aim of political philosophy is to uncover the normative foundation of a modern liberal democracy. Rawls’s political liberalism tries to bypass the problem of pluralism, using the intellectual device of the veil of ignorance, and yet paradoxically at the same time it treats it as something given and as an arbiter of justification within the political conception of justice. Habermas argues that Rawls not only incorrectly operationalizes the moral point of view from which we discern what is just but also fails to capture the specificity of democracy which is given by internal relations between politics and law. This deprives Rawls’s political philosophy of the conceptual tools needed to articulate the normative foundation of democracy.

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Moral Decision Making: From Bentham to Veil of Ignorance via Perspective Taking Accessibility

Behavioral Sciences ◽

10.3390/bs11050066 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (5) ◽

pp. 66

Author(s):

Rose Martin ◽

Petko Kusev ◽

Joseph Teal ◽

Victoria Baranova ◽

Bruce Rigal

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Perspective Taking ◽

Moral Decision ◽

Moral Decision Making ◽

Veil Of Ignorance ◽

Self Interest ◽

Moral Behaviour ◽

New Type ◽

The Veil ◽

Theoretical Proposal

Making morally sensitive decisions and evaluations pervade many human everyday activities. Philosophers, economists, psychologists and behavioural scientists researching such decision-making typically explore the principles, processes and predictors that constitute human moral decision-making. Crucially, very little research has explored the theoretical and methodological development (supported by empirical evidence) of utilitarian theories of moral decision-making. Accordingly, in this critical review article, we invite the reader on a moral journey from Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism to the veil of ignorance reasoning, via a recent theoretical proposal emphasising utilitarian moral behaviour—perspective-taking accessibility (PT accessibility). PT accessibility research revealed that providing participants with access to all situational perspectives in moral scenarios, eliminates (previously reported in the literature) inconsistency between their moral judgements and choices. Moreover, in contrast to any previous theoretical and methodological accounts, moral scenarios/tasks with full PT accessibility provide the participants with unbiased even odds (neither risk averse nor risk seeking) and impartiality. We conclude that the proposed by Martin et al. PT Accessibility (a new type of veil of ignorance with even odds that do not trigger self-interest, risk related preferences or decision biases) is necessary in order to measure humans’ prosocial utilitarian behaviour and promote its societal benefits.

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