Rawls says that we ought to decide the rules for our society from what he calls the “original position”—meaning ideally, we’d all decide how we would divvy up things like salaries and resources for our society before we knew which role we were going to play in that society. We’d conceive of these rules from behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding who we’re all going to become—it’s like deciding what the rules will be for grown-up humans, back when we’re all embryos. This, he says, guarantees a decently just world, and further guarantees that we’ll all think of it as just. “Certain principles of
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