The "
veil of ignorance" is a method of determining the
morality of issues. It asks a decision-maker to make a choice about a social or moral issue, and assumes that they have enough information to know the consequences of their possible decisions for everyone but would not know, or would not take into account, which person he or she is. The theory contends that not knowing one's ultimate position in society would lead to the creation of a just system, as the decision-maker would not want to make decisions which benefit a certain group at the expense of another, because the decision-maker could theoretically end up in either group. The idea has been present in moral philosophy at least since the eighteenth century. The veil of ignorance is part of a long tradition of thinking in terms of a
social contract that includes the writings of
Immanuel Kant,
Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke,
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and
Thomas Jefferson. Prominent modern names attached to it are
John Harsanyi and
John Rawls.
