Suppose you could write every rule of a society before being born into it, but you had no idea who you would be: your gender, ethnicity, wealth, health, or even your own values. That is the original position behind the veil of ignorance, the thought experiment at the heart of John Rawls' 1971 book A Theory of Justice. This episode explains the mechanism, from the distribution of primary social goods to the two-kids-sharing-a-cake analogy, and contrasts it with Hobbes' violent state of nature.

We then follow the debate that exploded around it. Rawls argued that rational people would adopt the maximin rule, producing equal basic liberties and the difference principle, but William Vickrey and John Harsanyi countered that risk-neutral people would maximize expected utility instead. We cover Robert Nozick's liberty critique, Michael Sandel's ide ...