John Rawls suggests the thought experiment of an "original position" where people decide the political system of a society under a "veil of ignorance" by which they lose the knowledge of certain information about themselves. Rawls's veil of ignorance doesn't justify the kind of society he supports.
It seems to fail at every step individually:
- At best, the support of people in the OP provides necessary but probably insufficient conditions for justice, unless he refutes all the other proposed conditions involving whatever rights, desert, etc.
- And really the conditions of the OP are actively contrary to good decision-making. For example, in the OP, you don't know your particular conception of the good (??) and you're essentially self-interested. . .
- There's no reason to think, generally, that people disagree with John Rawls only because of their social position or psychological quirks
- There's no reason to think, specifically, that people would have the literally infinite risk aversion required to support the maximin principle.
- Even given everything, the best social setup could easily be optimized for the long-term (in consideration of future people) in a way that makes it very different (e.g. harsher for the poor living today) from the kind of egalitarian society I understand Rawls to support.
More concretely:
- (A) I imagine that if Aristotle were under a thin veil of ignorance, he would just say "Well if I turn out to be born a slave then I will deserve it." It's unfair and not very convincing to say that people would just agree with a long list of your specific ideas if not for their personal circumstances.
- (B) If you won the lottery and I demanded that you sell your ticket to me for $100 on the grounds that you would have, hypothetically, agreed to do this yesterday (before you know that it was a winner), you don't have to do this; the hypothetical situation doesn't actually bear on reality in this way.
Another frame is that his argument involves a bunch of provisions that seem designed to avoid common counterarguments but are otherwise arbitrary (utility monsters, utilitarianism, etc).
I think it just forces people to choose a policy which is best for the whole of society rather than just a subset of it (as people tend to choose policies which benefit whatever subset they're part of)
If you're X kind of person you might want human rights for all X. By applying the veil of ignorance, you'd have to argue "Human rights should extent to all groups, even those I now consider to be bad people" (i.e. for all X), which actually is how human rights currently work (and isn't that what makes them good?)
It's simply neutrality and equality under the law. The act of making a policy which is objective rather than subjective. It's essentially the opposite of assuming that the majority is always correct, letting them dominate and bully the minorities, and calling this process "fair" or "democracy".
It's easy for the majority to say "We're correct and whoever disagrees is a terrible person", or for a minority to say "We're being treated unfairly because the majority is evil". By not knowing which group you will belong to, you're forced to come up with a policy which considers a scope large enough to be a superset of both groups, for instance "We will decide what's correct through the scientific model, and let everyone have a voice".
I think it works well for what it does (creating a fair, universal set of rules). It's not perfect, but I don't think a more perfect method is possible in reality. Maybe the idea generalizes poorly, maybe most people are incapable of applying the method? I'm not sure, I can't understand your arguments very well, so I'm just communicating my own intuition.
But (A) is possibly true, and (B) would be true until the information is updated. Would I buy lottery tickets for 20$ and sell them at 100$ before knowing if they were winning ones? Of course, this is the superior strategy every time. Would I sell a winning lottery ticket for less than the winning price? I would not, this is a losing strategy. I don't think this conflicts with the above intuition about fairness, it's a seperate and somewhat unintuitive math problem in my eyes.