information:highlighting, linguistic:voice_change
History

The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant whose work discussed the concept of the social contract, Adam Smith with his "impartial spectator", or the ideal observer theory. John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism rather than an argument for a social contract, as rational agents consider expected outcomes, not maximin outcomes or the worst-case outcomes. Harsanyi argued that a person in the original position would maximize their expected utility, rather than choosing minimax. The usage of the term by John Rawls was developed in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. Modern work tends to focus on the different decision theories that might describe the choice of the decision-maker "behind the veil". In addition, Michael Moehler has shown that, from a moral point of view, decision theory is not necessarily central to veil of ignorance arguments, but the precise moral ideals that are assumed to model the veil. From a moral point of view, there is not one veil of ignorance but many different versions of it.