Rawls wants you to forget your own name
A thought experiment for designing a fair society starts by making sure you don't know which seat you'll get.
Picture a group of people asked to write the rules for a society they're about to be born into. They don't know if they'll be rich or poor, healthy or sick, born into privilege or into war. John Rawls called this the original position: strip away every fact about who you are, and only then decide what counts as fair.
He called the blindfold the veil of ignorance. Behind it, Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice (1971), self-interest doesn't disappear — it just gets rerouted. If you might end up at the bottom, you stop designing rules that only work for the top. You start asking what a society owes its worst-off member, because that member might be you.
It's a strange kind of selfishness that produces generosity. Rawls wasn't asking people to be more moral. He was asking them to be smarter gamblers.
Most of us design our opinions from wherever we already sit.