The Veil and the Boundary

WORK

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls asks what principles of justice rational parties would choose if they did not know their own position in society — behind what he calls a veil of ignorance.

WHY IT MATTERS TO BOUNDARYISM

Rawls’s method is the most influential attempt to derive the structure of a just society from a position of imagined equality. If Boundaryism is a theory about position, it must say clearly how it stands in relation to the most famous thought experiment about position ever proposed.

BOUNDARYISM RESPONSE

The veil of ignorance is a powerful device, but it works by removing position rather than by taking position seriously. Behind the veil, no one has a body, a history, a location, a vulnerability. Everyone is, for the purpose of the choice, the same abstract chooser.

Boundaryism moves in the opposite direction. The injustices it is built to detect occur precisely between positions — between the one who defines and the one who is defined, the one who transfers cost and the one who bears it, the one who can leave and the one who cannot. These are not asymmetries that a rational chooser behind a veil would necessarily anticipate, because they do not present themselves as violations of agreed principles. They present themselves as normal operations of an orderly system.

Where Rawls asks what we would agree to if we did not know our position, Boundaryism asks what is happening to those whose position is already fixed, already disadvantaged, already foreclosed — and whether the structure they are inside still has any justification it could offer them. The veil asks about the principles of a just founding. Boundaryism asks about the boundaries of an existing arrangement. Both questions matter. But the second cannot be answered by the first, and it is the second that the world keeps forcing upon us.