Why veil of ignorance is total BS

I often hold the opinion that most of humanity-based liberal arts research like sociology is the study of coming up with a politically motivated conclusion first, then make up data and conditions to arrive to that conclusion.

I am saying this because in my opinion, John Rawls’ veil of ignorance is just perfect example of this. Albeit for me to say, as I am aware that there are already numerous criticisms from all angles towards this suppositions, unfortunately due to the popular Harvard Lecture, which is the extent to which most people know about moral theory and philosophy, it is still a popular argument in a lot of contexts. I want provide my exact reasoning as to why this thought experiment is flawed. The argument is summarized in This wiki page.

Harsanyi provides I think one of the better counterargument to Rawls’ conclusion, in that a rational agent considers expected outcomes of events, rather than maximin outcomes or the worst-case outcomes. While this statement is true, it in some way defeats the purpose of the original thought experiment, the subject of which are by no means rational agents. That is to say, when theory is justice is concerned, thinking along the same line of thoughts as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, what is more important, in my view, are the experiences of those agents, rather than logic.

Consider the following thought experiment: You are asked to deliberate the following two choices: 1. A society in which 1 in 100 people dies a gruesome death but the rest live affluent lives. 2. A society in which all people are well off, but perhaps not affluent. (And let’s suspend our disbelief that say that the sources of those affluences are mysterious and non-conflicting just for thought experiment purpose).

The human psyche is always more sensitive towards concentrated benefit/loss over distributed cost/gain, and this is common theme through all of history and across all political systems. And therefore most people would choose the latter, because it maximizes the average while maintaining a minimum floor. And this result is essentially proven by empirical studies.

But this is nothing new, what I am saying is, however, that the actual thought experiment has results gear more towards utilitarianism than what Rawls believes to be some rules of equity. However, my criticism takes a step further, not only do these “rational” agents seek to maximize personal utility, there is an additional aspect of societal utility that Rawls fails to account for, because in some way this is the entire flaw of the thought experiment. A call an agent that considers both personal utility and societal utility a “true rational agent”.

Allow me to explain, the problem of Kantian ethics, as so eloquently refuted by Justice Holmes in his writings, is that it does not actually operate in the real world. The principal justice and law system of our society, essentially uses individuals as objects subjected to statues and orders such that the overall welfare can be guaranteed, though not measured by “happiness” in the terms of Bentham, this is essentially an utilitarian principle. To put it more generally, a true rational agent, when pondering such thought experiment on the structure of society, would take into consideration, not only immediate personal utility, but a “social construct between future and past” in the words of Edmund Burke. In other words, a true rational agent has to consider the potential long-term effect of the social structure that’s being deliberated, both in its effect towards to past and the future; a true rational agent has an interest in the stability of societal structure, which even a rational agent can not because it has no consideration of utility beyond its own person.

Consider the following thought experiment: You are asked to deliberate the following two choices: 1. A society in which 10% of people are affluent, and the rest 90% live middle class, but an oracle system is implemented such that after each month, all wealth are equally distributed. 2. A society in which 10% of people are affluent, and the rest 90% live middle class, and no redistribution system is implemented.

Clearly, both cases reach a min floor with exact same expectation, which is to say there is no difference in personal utility. However, most people would go for the former because it sounds fair and it heightens the floor (maxmin). The problem with the first choice, clearly, is that it completely destroys the society. Because the wealth are equally distributed no matter what, there is no incentive amongst any person to create wealth and therefore the society collapses on its own. There is no mother Terresa or messiah, incentive and inequality are inherently connected. Abusing the words of Milton Friedman a bit, the only way to effectively eliminate the inequality in degree and knowledge, is to eliminate the incentive to have degree or knowledge whatsoever.

This example points out a crucial problem, which is that what most people prefer to be the solution that they perceive to maximize their own individual utility, is not the same as what’s best for society as a whole, which in other words means “fairness” does not translate to “morality”. What each individual perceive to be fair can sometimes be profoundly immoral as it leads to the decrease to societal utility, which in turns detrimental to individual utility, but across a longer time period, may be neglected by irrational agents.

And this is fundamentally my biggest problem with the veil of ignorance, the thought experiment only answers what is “just”, but not what is “moral”, and the implicit assumption on the setting evades many core questions of morality. For instance, many have questioned what’s preventing us from deliberating as animals, or fetuses, from an original position. And Rawls has no answer to that, because his thought experiemnt is fundamentally a tool to make his flawed argument which he comes up with first. I think we should be very careful when leveraging thought experiment in this form, a lot of angles need to considered to reach a conclusion on what is actually “moral”.