Talk:Original position

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Socrates
Philosophy Portal
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
Stub This article has been rated as Stub-Class on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.

[edit] Veil of ignorance

The concept of veil of ignorance was referred to, and simply explained, in an episode of the TV drama The West Wing. In season 4, episode 17, teleplay by Aaron Sorkin, the White House deputy communications director Will Bailey uses the concept to illustrate the philosophy behind the Democrats' tax policy. The policy proposes to increase income tax rates for top-earners by one per cent. One of a group of White House interns asks why those people should pay more tax when they have had to work hard to achieve their position. Bailey replies: "In answer to your question about why the [doctor] should accept a greater tax burden in spite of the fact that his success is well-earned, it's called the veil of ignorance. Imagine before you're born: you don't know anything about who you'll be, your abilities or your position - now design a tax system". An intern queries, "Veil of ignorance?", to which Bailey replies, "John Rawls". PHJ 14:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)


An easy way to illustrate the veil of ignorance is to imagine you are about to be born into society. You have no knowledge of, or control over, your social position, ie whether you will be prince or peasant, rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, clever or dull. Now: how would you prefer to see society structured? If Rawls is right, in your ignorance you would prefer his basic position and for a rule that says that everyone (and in particular the talented) can strive for advancement provided the people at the bottom of the heap are not thereby made worse off. - Pepper 150.203.227.130 12:59, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Excellent summary! Thanks! Piepants 18:09, 15 August 2006 (UTC)Piepants
Another way to describe the construct is to think of game theory in which every player's choice of available strategies is the same. This sameness is constructed by having Rawls assume that his hypothetical world has players who don't know their actual available choices, hence they believe that their choice set of strategies are symmetric with respect to all players. That is, not only does each person know that he doesn't know so must assume the sameness, they also each know that the other players also know that they know this and so on in infinite regress. Rawls also assumes that each person does not know his/her own tatstes or needs or desires so that their utility or shall I say, anticpated utility function can all be assumed the same. Each player assumes that all the otheers have their own utility. Hopefully with a symmetric set up, we will get a symmetric Nash equilibrium solution. However, it is entirely possible that all players are risk lovers, so Rawls (sub silento) makes the unstated assumption that they are all risk averse or how else would they all select a maximin rule? John wesley 18:16, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Rawls does not argue the theory this way. He merely modifies the veil so that individuals are unaware of the number of poor, middle class, and rich people exists so as to make it impossible to do the kind of probablilistic equations necissary to make this decision. Others have found that infeasable and have thus reverted to using risk aversion. CuttingEdge 11:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

This needs a criticism section.Larklight (talk) 15:30, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] John Harsanyi

I removed this from the article: "The concept of the original position was first used by the Hungarian economist John Harsanyi. Harsanyi claimed that a person in the original position would maximize his or her expected utility, rather than choosing minimax. This led him to endorse utilitarianism."

Original position has nothing to do with "his or her expected utility". "Rawls envisages that contracting parties abstract not just awareness of their own, but everyone's historical circumstances, desires and conceptions of the good." (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Therefore, in original position you cannot know anything about your expected utility, sorry. --90.157.254.206 (talk) 21:15, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Aaaand, another thing: Harsanyi's essay was published in 1982, while Rawls' book was published in 1971. --90.157.254.206 (talk) 21:47, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
Harsanyi addressed this first in his 1953 paper. An agent's expected utility behind the veil is the probability they are of some type (with associated income, productivity, preferences etc etc.) times the probability they are that type, which is just taken from the distribution of types in the real world. There is absolutely no problem with talking about expected utility behind the veil. In light of this I'm reverting the edit. -- cfp (talk) 15:45, 22 May 2008 (UTC)