John Rawls

The book sits on my desk—a 1971 Harvard University Press first edition, dust jacket long lost, the green cloth frayed at the corners from decades of handling I did not anticipate. To turn these pages now, at eighty, is to hear a younger man's voice, one still confident that a single, bounded society could serve as the stage for justice. The spine cracks softly. I have a pencil in hand, and I begin to write in the margins. 1. Page 137: "No one knows his place in society, his class position or social status." The clause assumes the stage already exists—a nation-state with a cooperative surplus to distribute. But what of those born outside the theater altogether? The stateless, the climate-displaced, those whose "society" is a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar? The veil, as written, blinds them not to their advantages but to their very eligibility for consideration. A global original position would need to ask first: who is included in "we"? 2. Page 139: "They do not know their own conception of the good." I once thought this protected pluralism. Now I see it also erases it. To bracket comprehensive doctrines is to assume they are separable from identity. But for many—Indigenous nations, religious minorities whose land is liturgy—the good is not a preference but a located practice. A twenty-first-century veil must not ask parties to forget their embeddedness; it must ensure that embeddedness does not dictate the distribution of power. 3. Page 141: The parties choose principles "for the basic structure of society." Here is the most brittle assumption: that the basic structure is a closed economic-political system, its climate a constant background. The coal-fired steel mill and the internal combustion engine were not externalities in 1971; they were progress. I did not foresee a century where the basic structure's emissions would redraw coastlines for people who had no voice in its design. Justice as fairness needs a geological dimension—principles that bind the generations in a chain of obligation to atmospheric integrity. 4. Page 140: The strains of commitment and the conditions of a well-ordered society. I imagined citizens who could look one another in the eye. But what of algorithmic governance, where decisions about credit, bail, and surveillance are made by systems whose "reasons" are opaque even to their designers? A well-ordered society in a digital age requires not just public reason but public legibility—the right to a human-readable account of the forces that shape one's life chances. 5. Page 137, again: The symmetry of the original position. I made the parties roughly equal in need and capacity—abstract persons negotiating over primary goods. But the planet's metabolism is not symmetrical. Extraction in one hemisphere creates drought in another. The veil must now render parties ignorant not only of their social position but of their ecological and temporal position: are they a 2024 consumer or a 2074 survivor? 6. Page 142: The list of primary goods. Liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, the social bases of self-respect. This list is silent on care—the work of raising children, tending elders, sustaining households—without which no society reproduces itself. A feminist critique I have long acknowledged, but the margin note I add today is sharper: care is not a secondary good to be distributed after production; it is the condition of production. The original position must recognize dependency as universal, not an exception. 7. Page 138: The formal constraints of the concept of right. Generality, universality, publicity, ordering, finality. I wrote these as logical virtues. But logic alone will not slow a warming ocean. The principles of justice require an affective supplement—a cultivated capacity for intergenerational empathy that no formal constraint can guarantee. The veil can model impartiality; it cannot model love for those not yet born. I close the book. The pencil notes crowd the margins, a palimpsest of second thoughts. The original position remains a powerful device for exposing the arbitrariness of fortune, but its architecture is a mid-twentieth-century building, and the weather has changed. The question I leave with you is not whether the veil is useful—it is—but this: what would you need to forget, and what would you need to remember, to design principles for a society that includes the as-yet-unborn, the far-away, and the non-human beings whose flourishing makes all justice possible?