Veil of Ignorance emerged out of a thought experiment conducted by John Rawls. In conducting the experiment, he sought to examine arguments about justice, integrity, parity, and social stature in a structured procedure. The Veil of Ignorance constitutes part of the social contract theory that is used to examine inklings for fairness. The thinking informs that people are fair and rely on their experiences to determine what is just or unjust. It achieves this by denying decision-makers the chance to use potentially prejudicing knowledge about who will profit more or less from the accessible possibilities (Mohapatra et al., 2017). Fair distribution of wealth would be attained by more clear thinking and impartiality, where selfish people are constrained by the absence of potentially biasing information.
Additionally, the veil of ignorance entails a device for moral intuition modeled to promote fair thinking. According to Mohapatra et Al. (2017), Rawls fashions a sense where a person is in an initial position behind a veil of ignorance. In this setting, people do not know themselves or their abilities or stature in society as defined by class, race, or gender. Further, they do not know whether they are healthy or ill or rich or poor. The decision-makers are reckoned to be barely self-interested. However, their determinations are impeded by insufficient information that they could expend to elect rules favorable to their subjective elements. Each person is simply assumed to be logical, autonomous, and morally equal. The veil itself embodies a covering tool that prevents people from completely comprehending where they would fall in a social platform. This means that individuals do not fully know where they will fall because the veil prevents them from definitively discerning their position.
Reference
Mohapatra, S., Wichmann, B., & Marcoul, P. (2017). Removing the “Veil of Ignorance”: Nonlinearities in education affect gender wage inequalities. Contemporary Economic Policy, 36(4), 644–666. Web.