Veil Of Ignorance Research Articles

The French and the Italians in relation to the difference principle

According to John Rawls, maximin, which requires that the economic situation of the most underprivileged should be maximized, is one of the fundamental principles of social justice. Based on three scenarios which attempt to place respondents behind a “veil of ignorance”, a French survey (PISJ, 2009) and an Italian survey (OSCF, 2016) conducted on representative quota-based samples show that support for this principle considerably outweighs support for strong equality and the maximization of total or average wealth. In addition, this choice transcends many sociodemographic or ideological divisions. The respondents were, however, much more undecided about which is more just: a society in which the poorest members are more numerous but richer or a society in which the poorest members are fewer in number but poorer. The robustness of the findings is confirmed by the similarity between the results from France and Italy.

Designing through the veil of ignorance

Designing through the veil of ignorance

Median-based Rules for Decision-making under Complete Ignorance

This article characterizes a class of rules for decision-making when an agent knows the possible states of the world and the outcome of each of his/her actions for each state, but does not have any information about the probabilities of the states. The existing literature in this framework has mainly considered ‘max’-based or ‘min’-based rules and their variants. Such rules reflect rather extreme forms of optimism or pessimism on the part of an agent. In contrast, this paper focuses on the median outcome(s) and characterizes a class of decision-making rules which reflects a more ‘balanced’ attitude towards uncertainty. We also discuss a possible interpretation of our result in terms of the ranking of alternative social states that an individual may have when he/she is under the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’. JEL Classifications: D81

External Validation of Voter Turnout Models by Concealed Parameter Recovery

We conduct a model validation analysis of several behavioral models of voter turnout, using laboratory data. We call our method of model validation concealed parameter recovery, where estimation of a model is done under a veil of ignorance about some of the experimentally controlled parameters — in this case voting costs. We use quantal response equilibrium as the underlying, common structure for estimation, and estimate models of instrumental voting, altruistic voting, expressive voting, and ethical voting. All the models except the ethical model recover the concealed parameters reasonably well. We also report the results of a counterfactual analysis based on the recovered parameters, to compare the policy implications of the different models about the cost of a subsidy to increase turnout.

External validation of voter turnout models by concealed parameter recovery

We conduct a model validation analysis of several behavioral models of voter turnout, using laboratory data. We call our method of model validation concealed parameter recovery, where estimation of a model is done under a veil of ignorance about some of the experimentally controlled parameters—in this case voting costs. We use quantal response equilibrium as the underlying, common structure for estimation, and estimate models of instrumental voting, altruistic voting, expressive voting, and ethical voting. All the models except the ethical voting model recover the concealed parameters reasonably well. We also report the results of a counterfactual analysis based on the recovered parameters, to compare the policy implications of the different models about the cost of a subsidy to increase turnout.

Secular Buddhism and Justice

Starting point: The core idea of secular Buddhism is to grasp the spirit of early Buddhism and transpose it into the present. The best known approach to implement this idea is Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, an approach which advocates an agnostic stance with regard to the doctrine of rebirth and denies its relevance for daily practice.Type of problem:• Is there a way to revise the doctrine of rebirth, instead of completely dropping it?• What is the impact on the notion of justice?Result: The doctrine of rebirth cannot be revised in a strict sense, but there are some striking similarities between the ancient and modern (biological) view on the topic. Since the stream of genetic and epigenetic information has the power to create consciousness and reflects experiences of past lives, it can be associated with the stream of consciousness (cittasantāna) in the Mahayana model of rebirth. Parents not only determine the genetic constitution of their children, they also transfer character traits by means of epigenetic heredity. If genetic inheritance is associated with karma, then genes become an element of synchronic and diachronic connectedness (pratītya-samutpāda). Instead of an individual learning process across successive lives, there is a collective learning process across successive generations.Given the biological model of rebirth, the belief in cosmic justice turns into a quest for mundane justice. There is a thought experiment for constructing such a concept, which complies well with the secular Buddhist spirit. John Rawls assumes that the legislative deliberation is taking place ‘behind a veil of ignorance’, so that the participants of the deliberation do not know their future genetic constitution and their future position within the society. If the participants imagine that their future self is contingent and impermanent – in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine of anātman and anitya – then the resulting principles of justice will be impartial.

The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls argues that the Difference Principle (also known as the Maximin Equity Criterion) would be chosen by parties trying to advance their individual interests behind the Veil of Ignorance. Behind this veil, the parties do not know who they are and they are unable to assign or estimate probabilities to their turning out to be any particular person in society. Much discussion of Rawls’s argument concerns whether he can plausibly rule out the parties’ having access to probabilities about who they are. Nevertheless, I argue that, even if the parties lacked access to probabilities about who they are in society, they would still reject the Difference Principle. I argue that there are cases where it is still clear to the parties that it is not in any of their individual interests that the Difference Principle is adopted.

Measuring Tastes for Equity and Aggregate Wealth Behind the Veil of Ignorance

We propose an instrument to measure individuals' social preferences regarding equity and efficiency behind a veil of ignorance. We pair portfolio and wealth distribution choice problems which have a common budget set. For a given bundle, the distribution over an individual's wealth is the same for both problems. The portfolio choice serves as a benchmark to evaluate whether the wealth distribution choice exhibits equity or efficiency preferring tastes. We report experiments using a within-subject design testing the veracity of this instrument. We find clusters of equity preferring, efficiency preferring, and socially agnostic individuals through reduced form, revealed preference, and structural estimation analyses.

Median-Based Rules for Decision-Making Under Complete Ignorance

This paper characterizes a class of rules for decision-making when an agent knows the possible states of the world and the outcome of each of her actions for each state, but does not have any information about the probabilities of the states. The existing literature in this framework has mainly considered ‘max’-based or ‘min’-based rules and their variants. Such rules reflect rather extreme forms of optimism or pessimism on the part of an agent. In contrast, this paper focuses on the median outcome(s) and characterizes a class of decision-making rules, which reflects a more ‘balanced’ attitude towards uncertainty. We also discuss a possible interpretation of our result in terms of the ranking of alternative social states that an individual may have when she is under the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”.

John Rawls’s Political Ethics and Some Implications to the Educational Welfare of Cameroon

Citizens in a democratic society have and believe in different worldviews. They have different conception of right and wrong, religion, lifestyle and even forms of interpersonal relationship but there exist only one law within a country. Rawls brings forth the idea of political liberalism and wonders how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can remain stable when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines. He holds that the need to impose a unified law poses the problem of legitimacy and stability and if successfully put in place, justice must have been done to the citizens. He developed a concept that he deemed the ‘original position’, which gives people a chance to decide on the principles of justice from a ‘veil of ignorance’. This original position is a hypothetical situation where no one has any advantage over another. Behind this veil, all individuals are free and equal beings in the society. They do not know anything of themselves, their natural abilities, or their position in the society in which they live. Would they choose differently if they weren’t aware of these things? Would their society be less judgmental? According to Rawls, the people in the original position, behind the said veil of ignorance would adopt principles that would and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages in the society. The present instability in the Cameroon’s educational welfare could have been avoided if these social services were equally distributed.

Beyond GDP: Is there a law of one shadow price?

This paper builds a welfare measure encompassing household disposable income, unemployment and longevity, which are valued either from life satisfaction data (“subjective shadow prices”) or from calibrated utility functions (“model-based shadow prices”). The two different sets of shadow prices are shown to be broadly consistent once a number of conditions are fulfilled: i) running life satisfaction regressions at the country level rather than at the individual level to reduce the downward bias on the income variable due to measurement errors; (ii) valuing the unemployment risk in a state-contingent framework rather than under the veil of ignorance; (iii) disentangling relative risk aversion parameters for unemployment and vital risks; (iv) calibrating the utility function on adult lifespan rather than life expectancy at birth.

Diskursus Mengenai Keadilan Sosial: Kajian Teori Keadilan dalam Liberalisme Locke, Persamaan Marx, dan 'Justice as Fairness' Rawls

Through the history of philosophy, the theme of justice has become a very important topic. Thinkers of the theories such as utilitarianism, intuitionism, eudaimonism, perfectionism, liberalism, communitarianism, and socialism have discussed the theme. As French philosopher Alain Badiou has pointed out, the central of political studies from the time of Plato to the present day is justice. The question is what is justice? For John Rawls, justice is the supreme virtue of human. In <em>A Theory of Justice</em>, Rawls asserts that justice is the first priority in social institutions, as is truth in the system of thought. A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is not true, so the laws and institutions, however efficient and neat, must be reformed or removed if it is unfair. Rawls criticizes the theory of justice in Lockean liberalism and Marxian socialism. Both theories of justice are very strong colouring the landscape of debate on the roots of thinking about justice. For Rawls, liberalism that accentuates basic freedoms can create inequality between people who have better abilities with less fortunate people. Similarly, socialism which accentuates equality ignores basic freedoms. The two theories of justice are considered ideological in the sense that there are hidden interests behind the jargons of freedom and equality. Rawls then develops an abstract theory of justice, in which the participants depart from a veil of ignorance, so that they are free of any interest and ambition. Here they might build a cooperative contract in a society governed by the principles of justice.

White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history

Themes of loss, grief, and vulnerability have come to occupy an increasingly central position in contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory. Thinkers such as Judith Butler and Stephen White have argued that grief has the capacity to access or stage a commonality that eludes politics and on which a new cosmopolitan ethics can be built. Focusing on the role of grief in recent pro-refugee activism in Europe, this article argues that these ethical perspectives contribute to an ideological formation that disconnects connected histories and that turns questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. The result is a veil of ignorance which, while not precisely Rawlsian, allows the European subject to re-constitute itself as ‘ethical’ and ‘good’, innocent of its imperialist histories and present complicities.

Knowledge, power, and self-interest

The paperreports the results of a laboratory experiment assessing the impact of social position (endowment) and power (structurally advantaged or disadvantaged network positions) on redistributive decisions, which involve a classical efficiency-equality trade-off. The experiment involves three decision conditions: veil of ignorance, informed dictator, and majority vote. We use a three-person social-preference model in order to derive hypotheses on the effect of knowledge and power on tax choices. Our results confirm that disclosing the social position raises the measured self-interest (Knowledge Effect) and that mandating a majority vote results in concessions, the size of which depends on the player's structural position in the network (Power Effect).

Optimal inequality behind the veil of ignorance

In Rawls’ (A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971) influential social contract approach to distributive justice, the fair income distribution is the one that an individual would choose behind a veil of ignorance. Harsanyi (J Polit Econ 61:434–435, 1953, J Polit Econ 63:309–332, 1955, Am Polit Sci Rev 69:594–606, 1975) treated this situation as a decision under risk and arrived at utilitarianism using expected utility theory. This paper investigates the implications of applying cumulative prospect theory instead, which better describes behavior under risk. I find that the specific type of inequality in bottom-heavy right-skewed income distributions, which includes the log-normal income distribution, could be perceived as desirable. This optimal inequality result contrasts the implications of other social welfare criteria.

Modulating the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex by tDCS alters distributive decisions behind the veil of ignorance via risk preference

Distributive justice concerns how individuals and societies distribute income in a just or equal manner. Previous studies from behavioural experiments have revealed that participants’ distributive decisions vary according to the contexts of income distribution. Despite the long history of work on distributive behaviour, however, its psychological and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. There many debates on whether and how the “weights” that are assigned to the individual payoffs (self-interest or risk aversion) and the payoff distribution of the others (social preference or fairness) in participants’ objective functions, especially behind the veil of ignorance. In the present study, we aimed to separately analyse the effects of risk aversion and impartial social preferences in a veil of ignorance setting and to test the roles of social welfare and self-interest in behavioural distributive justice. We thus provide evidence of a causal link between the neural and behavioural results through the application of bilateral transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) of our participants. The participants were found to distribute more income to the lowest income stratum and to make fairer distributions under the veil after receiving right anodal/less cathodal tDCS over DLPFC. In contrast, the participants distributed less income to the lowest income stratum and made more unfair distribution under the veil after receiving right cathodal/left anodal tDCS over DLPFC. Simultaneously, we elicited the participants’ risk preferences and found that the participants who received right anodal/left cathodal tDCS over DLPFC were more conservative than the participants who received sham stimulation, whereas participants who received right cathodal/left anodal tDCS over DLPFC were more risky than the participants who received sham stimulation. These findings are fully consistent with a stimulation effect of the participants’ distributive decisions under the veil of ignorance, and the participants’ distributive proportions to the lowest income stratum under the veil of ignorance were strongly related to their risk preference. Therefore, the present study demonstrated that modulating the excitability of the DLPFC using tDCS altered the distributive decisions of the participants under the veil of ignorance, and this effect might be attributable to a change in the individuals’ risk pReferences

Techniques and Tradeoffs for Incorporating Cost- and Time-Saving Measures into International Arbitration Agreements

Empirical research reveals that users of international arbitration view undue time and cost as international arbitration’s worst attributes. This article offers some potential solutions to combat this increasing dissatisfaction, focusing on a prophylactic approach in which parties are encouraged to negotiate and incorporate cost- and time-saving measures directly into the arbitration clause of their underlying contract. In the early stages of a commercial relationship, parties operate behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, a concept derived from modern social philosophy in which members of a nascent society are prevented from knowing what position they will occupy in that society. Without the knowledge of how the future society’s rules and policies might affect them personally, each participant will be naturally inclined to promote, agree to, and implement rules and policies that are fair and advantageous to all. Likewise, if parties to a nascent commercial relationship address cost- and time-saving techniques during the earliest stages of that relationship, they will be incentivized to agree to a dispute resolution framework that reduces time and costs more effectively than if they sought to implement those measures after a dispute has arisen. This article discusses several suggested measures designed to increase the economy and efficiency of international arbitration, along with a discussion of the respective tradeoffs and practical limitations of including those measures in the parties’ arbitration agreement.

Taking Risks behind the Veil of Ignorance

A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone’s interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the “original position.” I draw on recent work in decision theory, along with an intuitive principle about risk taking, to derive the view.

The economics and philosophy of the brain drain: A critical perspective from the periphery

The paper provides a critical perspective on recent contributions to the economics literature, and associated philosophical arguments, that downplay negative effects of skilled migration on developing countries. The assertion that such migration incentivises investment in human capital is shown to rely on shaky theoretical foundations and weak empirical evidence. The associated economic literature suggesting a net positive effect of brain drain is at odds with literatures on the positive effects of human capital and education on economic growth. The manner in which net effects are determined also demonstrates that such contributions are utilitarian in nature. Identifying those who are the worst affected by brain drain, as well as the possible decision of a citizen placed behind the veil of ignorance, supports the view that opposing barriers to brain drain is inconsistent with a Rawlsian social welfare function. The undermining of institutions by skilled emigration is a fundamental consideration neglected by the economics literature without justification and, again, contradicts literatures on growth and institutions within economics. The economic theory of education can also be shown to support the view that depriving governments of the power to limit migration undermines states’ ability to resolve market failures. A number of other issues are identified that deserve greater consideration, including reflexivity in research on brain drain, the political economy of skilled migration and the philosophical status of nation-states. Despite unreliable econometric evidence, there is sufficient basis and justification to act. The paper concludes by briefly sketching possible actions under different degrees of international cooperation.

Ageing and Terminal Illness: Problems for Rawlsian Justice

AbstractThis article considers attempts to include the issues of ageing and ill health in a Rawlsian framework. It first considers Norman Daniels’ Prudential Lifespan Account, which reduces intergenerational questions to issues of intrapersonal prudence from behind a Rawslian veil of ignorance. This approach faces several problems of idealisation, including those raised by Hugh Lazenby, because it must assume that everyone will live to the same age, undermining its status as a prudential calculation. I then assess Lazenby's account, which applies Rawls’ general theory of justice more directly to healthcare. Lazenby suggests that we should apply Rawls’ difference principle – which claims that any inequalities in social goods must benefit the worst off – to conclude that we should significantly prioritise treatment of young patients. I argue first that the existence of young terminally ill patients undermines a number of Rawlsian arguments for the difference principle. I then argue that the structure of ageing undermines the Rawlsian decision mechanism of the ‘veil of ignorance’ on which Lazenby relies. I conclude that age and terminal illness present significant problems for any comprehensive Rawlsian account of justice.