According to John Rawls, if we were behind a “veil of ignorance,” deliberating about what kind of a society we would want to live in, we would agree on the following idea:
“All [basic] social [goods]–liberty and opportunity, income and wealth…–are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these [goods] is to everyone’s advantage.”
Part 1: Explain the basic idea behind Rawls’s test–whether a social arrangement or policy is acceptable from behind a “veil of ignorance”–in your own words.
Part 2: Give 2 examples of official laws or institutions or policies in current (i.e., not past or historical) U.S. society that don’t pass Rawls’s test of fairness, and explain why they don’t.
