Veil of Ignorance?

A Theory of Justice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an entirely and deliberately artificial device he calls the Original position, in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This 'veil' is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves that might cloud what notion of justice is developed."

In 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice thus restarting political philosophy which had been in the doldrums during the 1950s and 1960s. For me this date coincides with a time just after the birth of TTDE and I can't resist speculating a little on what Rawls might have meant with the "veil of ignorance".

It seems like we are dealing with a justification of the procedure, perhaps common at the time, of organizing people in "systems" even without their consent or knowledge of the game? It became possible to clandestinely study the psychological reactions of people to posed questions and this led to the possibility of a detailed investigation of a person's prior life in order to present a thorough character analysis. Someone playing God could then place a person in this new "ministate".

The so created systems or ministates would then be more or less successful and fuse with other ministates to gradually bring us back to the national level with a set of "traffic rules" replacing the law-book of the previous society. The traffic rules are supposed to make individual paths of development possible within the system in line with a liberal set-up. People drive on the individual road and just have to stop at for example a red light now and then. Fees are collected for redistribution for the common good and helping the poor. Rawls, however, is left of the welfare state which he rejects.

Rawls ministates would ultimately form something like the society Sweden represents and Robert Nozick, also at Harvard University, produced a libertarian version of Rawls ministates calling the redistribution unfair. Each system has to decide on how large a fee would be reasonable thus perhaps making a total fusion of the ministates impossible. The nation will remain multi-fractured or fracture in larger chunks.

Just a preliminary analysis but this might be something rather than mini-kingdoms? You know, the Americans don't like Kings and Queens.