This thought experiment was created by the American philosopher John Rawls. He asks us to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we know nothing of our true lives — we are behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing the political system under which we live or the laws that are in place. Nor do we know anything about psychology, economics, biology, and other sciences.

Along with a group of similarly situation-blind people, we are asked, in this original position, to review a comprehensive list of classic forms of justice drawn from various traditions of social and political philosophy. We are then given the task of selecting which system of justice we feel would best suit our needs in the absence of any information about our true selves and the situation we may actually be in in the real world.

So, for example, what if you came back to “real life” to find out that you live in a shanty town in India? Or a middle class neighborhood in Norway? What if you’re a developmentally disabled person? A wealthy elite? A Syrian citizen internally displaced by the on-going war? Or for our purposes, A Syrian who suffered from the use of internationally banned chemical weapons launched by the Syrian President against his own people? (Or as was proposed in a paper, “All Together Now,” a different species?)

According to Rawls, we would all likely end up picking something that guarantees equal basic rights and liberties to secure our interests as free and equal citizens, and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the common good. He also speculated that we’d likely choose a system that ensures universal human rights, both negative and positive rights (such as fair educational and employment opportunities).  In short, we would all choose to maximize justice for the least favoured persons in a country or the world.