In his theory of social justice John Rawls proposed a model of fairness in a thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance .
People were imagined removed from their acquired and natural endowments and ignorant of their positions in life. Rawls suggested that that given this situation - in which people did not know what their lot would be (or was) - they would choose equal distributions of advantages and resources - and that is what we should call fair or just.
The idea’s somewhat similar to the thinking behind letting one person cut the cake and another choose the first slice and it’s amenable to experimentation. Is it true that people will opt for equal distribution? And if it isn’t true in practice, what of Rawls’s use of the principle to define fairness?
Experiments indicate that people will agree to enter into a contract, knowing that the outcome will be an unequal distributution of goods / wealth / position, if they have an acceptable chance of ending up on the winning side. If Rawls’s position really does rely upon a testable assertion about what people will do it seems that he’s been tested and he’s wrong.
