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.
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.