Design society's rules without knowing which role in it you'll be born into

John Rawls proposed imagining people choosing a society's principles from behind a 'veil of ignorance,' knowing nothing about their own eventual race, wealth, talents, or class. Reasoning this way, with no idea whether you'd end up advantaged, would lead people to favour fairer, more protective institutions than pure self-interest would pick. It became one of the most influential thought experiments in modern political philosophy.

— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice — Harvard University Press, 1971
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