In Rawls' thinking, the veil of ignorance is a device that
can be used to help a person determine whether something (an action or an institution or
such) is moral.
What Rawls says is that you can only
determine the morality of an action or institution or custom if you use the veil. What
this means is that you have to consider the action, etc. as if you did not know how it
would affect you -- which position in the society you would hold. As an example of
this, when you consider the morality of allowing gay marriage, you would have to
consider it not knowing whether you would be a gay person or a fundamentalist
Christian.
By using this veil, a person is forced to
consider the implications of the action, etc. from the perspectives of various other
people. This, to Rawls, allows a person to consider the true morality of the
action.
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