The Injustice Many of us feel that our societies are a little or even plain totally unfair. But we have a hard time explaining our sense of injustice to the powers that be in a way that sounds rational and without personal peak or bitterness. That's why we need John Rawls, a 20th century American philosopher who provides us with a fail-proof model for identifying what truly might be unfair and how we might gather support for fixing things. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 1921, Rawls, nicknamed Jack, was exposed and responded to the injustices of the modern world from a very young age. As a child, he witnessed at first hand shocking poverty in the United States, the death of his brothers from an illness he unwittingly transmitted to them, and the horrors and lawlessness of the Second World War. All this inspired him to go into academia. He wanted to use the power of ideas to change the unjust world he was living in. It was the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 that properly made Rawls' name. Having read and widely discussed this book, Bill Clinton was to label Rawls the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century and had him over to the White House for dinner on a regular basis. What then does this exemplar of fairness have to tell the modern world? Firstly, that things as they are now are patently unfair. The statistics all point to the radical unfairness of society. Comparative charts of life expectancy and income projections direct us to a single overwhelming moral. But day to day, it can be hard to take this unfairness seriously, especially in relation to our own lives. That's because so many voices are on hand telling us that if we work hard and have ambition, we can make it. Rawls was deeply aware of how the American dream seeped through the political system and into individual hearts, and he knew its corrosive, regressive influence. He was a statistician who knew that the rags to riches tales were overall so negligible as not to warrant serious attention by political theorists. Indeed, mentioning them was merely a clever political sleight of hand designed to prevent the powerful from having to undertake the necessary task of reforming society from top to bottom. Rawls understood that debates about unfairness and what to do about it often get bogged down in arcane details and petty squabbling, which mean that year after year nothing quite gets done. What Rawls was therefore after was a simple, economical and polemical way to show people how their societies were unfair and what they might do about it. Imagine if you were not you. Rawls intuitively understood that a lot of the reason why societies don't become fairer is that those who benefit from current injustice are spared the need to think too hard about what it would have been like to be born in different circumstances. So he devised one of the greatest thought experiments in the history of political thought. He called it the Veil of Ignorance. Rawls asked us to imagine ourselves in a conscious, intelligent state before our own birth, but without any knowledge of what circumstances we are going to be born into, our futures shrouded by a veil of ignorance. Hovering high above the planet, Rawls was fascinated by the Apollo space programme, we wouldn't know what sort of parents we'd have, what our neighbourhoods would be like, how the schools would perform, what the local hospital could do for us and how the police and judicial systems might on. The question that Rawls asked us all to contemplate is, if we knew nothing about where we'd end up, what sort of a society would it feel safe to enter? The veil of ignorance stops us thinking about all those who've done quite well and draws our attention to the appalling risks involved in entering, for example, US society as if it were a lottery, without knowing if you'd wind up the child of an orthodontist in Scottsdale, Arizona, or as the offspring of a black single mother in the rougher bits of eastern Detroit. Would any sane birth lottery player really want to take the gamble of ending up in the society we now have? Probably not. They'd insist that the rules of the entire game had to be changed, otherwise it would be too risky. You know what needs to be fixed. Rawls answers the question for us. Any sane participant of the veil of ignorance experiment is going to want a society with a number of things in place. They'll want the schools to be very good, the hospitals to function brilliantly, unimpeachable and fair access to the law and decent housing for everyone. The veil of ignorance forces observers to accept that the country they'd really want to be born randomly into would almost certainly be a version of, say, Switzerland or Denmark. In other words, we know what sort of a society we want to live in. We just haven't focused on it properly until now because the choices have already been made. Rawls' experiment allows us to think more objectively about what a fair society looks like in its details. When addressing major decisions about the allocation of resources, we need only ask ourselves, how would I feel about this issue if I was stuck behind the veil of ignorance? The fair answer emerges directly when we contemplate what we'd need to do in order still to be adequately positioned in the worst case scenario. What to do next? A lot will depend on what's wrong with your society. In this sense, Rawls was usefully indoctrinaire. He recognised that the veil of ignorance experiment throws up different issues in different contexts. In some, the priority might be to fix air pollution, in others the school system. But crucially, Rawls provides us with a tool to critique our current societies based on a beautifully simple experiment. We'll know we've finally made our societies fair when we'll be able to say, in all honesty, from a position of imaginary ignorance before our births, that yes, we simply wouldn't mind at all what kind of circumstances our future parents might have and what sort of neighbourhoods we might be born into. The fact that we simply couldn't sanely take on such a challenge now is a measure of how deeply unfair things remain and therefore of how much we still have left to achieve. All this, John Rawls, has helped us to see.