From the wiki article linked in the first footnote.
> The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers (...) John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism
So while Rawls used the veil to argue in favor of the described position, the veil has also been used to argue for (average preference) utilitarianism.
Also (average preference) utilitarianism doesn't technically demand your preferences to change in any way, it is simply a description of what morally good outcomes are. And doesn't have a position on what constitutes good desires.
Eg if humans desire to have special relationships with certain people then utilitarianism recommends (absent an overwriting concern) that people do have such relationships.
the veil of ignorance is not an argument about caring for others. it’s a thought experiment used to think about how one would want to structure society given that none of us chose to be born into the circumstances in which we were born.
you could argue that the veil of ignorance leads us to conclude that we should care about people, but the veil of ignorance could just as easily be used to argue that we *shouldn’t* care about people … at least not that much.
consider a society in which working adults at the high end of the economic distribution make $100,000/ year, while those at the lower end make $50,000. imagine that this society cares deeply for for the comparatively “impoverished” financial circumstances of those at the lower end of distribution and, thus, decides to redistribute the economic goods equally. imagine then that this results (due to the economic upheaval this redistribution creates) in everyone making $40,000/ year. … this type of redistribution would be unjust according to rawls’s theory (which makes space for what he calls “beneficial inequality”) since it actually makes people at the low end of the economic distribution worse off than they were under an unequal distribution … and this latter, economically equal society would clearly be a less desirable society to be born into than the former, economically unequal society when considered from behind the veil of ignorance.
in other words, the veil of ignorance can help us to evaluate which forms of inequality are just and which are not, and therefore, can actually help us to *limit* the extent to which we care about the existence of some, beneficial forms of inequality and, consequently, the people at the lower ends of those distributions.
If Rawls (or a Rawls advocate) actually makes this claim, then I call it a false claim. It is, again, pretending at something it doesn't do. "Don't make literally everyone even worse off" is a principle that was discovered thousands of years before Rawls.
> "given that none of us chose to be born into the circumstances in which we were born"
This is the purpose of Rawls. To try to convince one to act as if no one has done anything to affect the circumstances we were born into.
From the wiki article linked in the first footnote.
> The concept of the veil of ignorance has been in use by other names for centuries by philosophers (...) John Harsanyi helped to formalize the concept in economics, and argued that it provides an argument in favor of utilitarianism
So while Rawls used the veil to argue in favor of the described position, the veil has also been used to argue for (average preference) utilitarianism.
Also (average preference) utilitarianism doesn't technically demand your preferences to change in any way, it is simply a description of what morally good outcomes are. And doesn't have a position on what constitutes good desires.
Eg if humans desire to have special relationships with certain people then utilitarianism recommends (absent an overwriting concern) that people do have such relationships.
the veil of ignorance is not an argument about caring for others. it’s a thought experiment used to think about how one would want to structure society given that none of us chose to be born into the circumstances in which we were born.
you could argue that the veil of ignorance leads us to conclude that we should care about people, but the veil of ignorance could just as easily be used to argue that we *shouldn’t* care about people … at least not that much.
consider a society in which working adults at the high end of the economic distribution make $100,000/ year, while those at the lower end make $50,000. imagine that this society cares deeply for for the comparatively “impoverished” financial circumstances of those at the lower end of distribution and, thus, decides to redistribute the economic goods equally. imagine then that this results (due to the economic upheaval this redistribution creates) in everyone making $40,000/ year. … this type of redistribution would be unjust according to rawls’s theory (which makes space for what he calls “beneficial inequality”) since it actually makes people at the low end of the economic distribution worse off than they were under an unequal distribution … and this latter, economically equal society would clearly be a less desirable society to be born into than the former, economically unequal society when considered from behind the veil of ignorance.
in other words, the veil of ignorance can help us to evaluate which forms of inequality are just and which are not, and therefore, can actually help us to *limit* the extent to which we care about the existence of some, beneficial forms of inequality and, consequently, the people at the lower ends of those distributions.
If Rawls (or a Rawls advocate) actually makes this claim, then I call it a false claim. It is, again, pretending at something it doesn't do. "Don't make literally everyone even worse off" is a principle that was discovered thousands of years before Rawls.
> "given that none of us chose to be born into the circumstances in which we were born"
This is the purpose of Rawls. To try to convince one to act as if no one has done anything to affect the circumstances we were born into.