A Theory of Justice Reframed: The Limits of Abstraction and Contemporary Application

Introduction: 

Forming public policy in the United States often proceeds with ubiquity in mind: the advancement of solutions meant to apply broadly across the population, irrespective of class, race, sex, language, or immigration status. Contemporary public policy reflects an overarching commitment to justice understood as something that must serve everyone. In examining the lens through which justice is understood, it becomes clear that justice is largely regarded as an abstract ideal. It functions aspirationally, detached from the social and institutional realities that shape people’s lives, and this is, in part, responsible for the persistent disparities that public policy fails to rectify. As public policy is the primary mechanism through which principles of justice are realized, any meaningful pursuit of justice requires not only a definition of fairness but a careful examination of the institutional structures that distribute opportunity, risk, and power. Clarifying this abstraction is therefore essential to designing policy that is grounded in first hand knowledge, particularly where claims of universality risk reinforcing inequality rather than remedying it. 

Philosopher John Rawls worked to address these issues of inequity by creating a framework to eliminate biased decision-making. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls introduces the Veil of Ignorance. Rawls asks decision-makers to envision society from “Original Position,” where they have no knowledge of their positioning in society, i.e., class, race, sex, knowledge, or natural abilities. Original Position orients decision-makers to act without biases– if they know nothing about their social positioning, they cannot act in self-interest. This intentional lack of knowledge is the “veil” that hides their social identity. The Veil thus works to facilitate impartiality: if participants cannot predict whether their choice will benefit themselves or not, they are incentivized to choose principles that can be universally justified. 

Rawls details two principles of justice that rational participants would follow. The first is equal and basic liberties for all, the second is the allowance for social and economic inequalities, only when they benefit the least advantaged members of society(the Difference Principle). Rawls’ reasoning is contingent on maximin logic; when faced with uncertainty about one’s positioning, rational actors prioritize improving the worst-case scenario. The maximin logic is attractive to policymakers as it works as a control when designing fair institutions independent of identity-based self-interest. 

The Original Position is characterized by its lasting influence and moral appeal; however, its application in contemporary policymaking raises a critical question: Does this abstraction of justice allow it to be meaningfully realized in a society shaped by enduring, structural inequality? This question exposes epistemic challenges inherent in theories of justice that treat social identity as immaterial. In contexts marked by unequal access to power and resources, the assumption that fairness can be achieved through abstraction alone warrants closer analysis. The tension between impartiality and social reality forms the central problem this paper examines.

Critiques and Expansions

Amartya Sen: Justice and Indifference to Lived Experience

Sen’s critique of Rawls in The Idea of Justice spotlights the gap between institutional injustice and policymaking. He highlights the abstraction of justice and explains its fragmented utility as a policy method. Sen distinguishes two approaches to justice: a “realisation-focused” one and an “arrangement-focused” one. An arrangement-focused approach evaluates justice based on the fairness of institutions, rules, and procedures, whereas a realization-focused approach considers how those institutions shape lived experiences. Sen argues that justice cannot only be assessed by the design of social arrangements but must consider the outcomes these arrangements produce. To clarify this distinction, Sen references the difference between nīti, which is institutional correctness, and nyāya, which focuses on justice as experienced by people in a society. This distinction reveals a limitation of the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance. It exposes the Veil’s abstraction to be missing tangible results: even if fairer institutions are built, justice is not achieved unless these institutions actuate a better, more equitable lived experience. Sen regards this form of limited justice as “transcendental institutionalism,” which facilitates indeterminacy and moral distance from practical decision-making. A policymaking perspective reveals that “transcendental institutionalism” neglects to consider whether idealized neutrality in decision-making can actually benefit the most disadvantaged. This critique does not suggest that public policy can dispense with abstraction, which is indispensable to its public and political character. Instead, it exposes a central tension in justice-based policymaking: whether abstract principles, when treated as self-sufficient, can adequately address the unequal structural conditions they govern. The concern is not abstraction itself, but its indifference to how power, risk, and opportunity are distributed in practice.

Okin: Abstraction and Gendered Injustice

Okin offers a feminist perspective in her critique of Rawls and illustrates how abstraction can conceal the structures responsible for injustice. Okin argues that social theories of justice, ones that often claim neutrality, have historically failed to consider family structures and the gendered division of labor within them. For Okin, this omission is not only an oversight but a form of erasure: the family is not peripheral to justice, but a primary site where power, dependency, and opportunity are produced and distributed. Because family structures shape access to education, work, political participation, and financial autonomy, a theory of justice must consider how these dynamics condition individuals’ life chances. In excluding family from his analysis, Rawls overlooks a significant source of inequality. These access differences shape individual opportunities independent of entering the public sphere or society that Rawls aims to make more just. Rawls’ assumption that families are already just, or that intrafamilial justice is “private,” does not address deep-rooted gender inequalities and dynamics. Thus, Okin’s feminist perspective demonstrates that any theory of fairness must address gendered structures to achieve meaningful, lasting equality.

While Rawls confines justice to the public “basic structure” of society, Okin’s critique exposes a tension within this limitation. By treating the family as private or presumptively just, Rawls assumes that individuals enter the public sphere from sufficiently equal starting positions. Okin challenges this assumption by demonstrating that family arrangements are causally prior to public institutions and materially shape who can meaningfully benefit from them. The gendered distribution of care labor, dependency expectations, and authority within families influences individuals’ capacities, opportunities, and vulnerabilities long before public policy takes effect.

Crucially, Okin’s critique does not rest on the claim that families must mirror public institutions or be governed by identical principles of justice. Rather, she contends that excluding family dynamics from consideration undermines Rawls’s own commitments to fair equality of opportunity and the Difference Principle. If individuals begin social life from structurally unequal positions produced within the family, then public policies designed without regard to these conditions cannot reliably benefit the least advantaged or secure fair opportunity. In this sense, the abstraction that renders family structures invisible does not preserve neutrality; it allows foundational inequalities to persist beneath the surface of formally just institutions, compromising the realization of justice in the public sphere.

Mills, Moloney & Lewis: A Theory of Justice and Race

Abstraction within the liberal social contract tradition has garnered the critique of racial justice theorists, not only for overlooking race but also for contributing to its institutional exclusion.  In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills contends that what has been historically regarded as a “social contract” can be more accurately understood as a racial contract. This refers to an agreement that establishes and maintains political, economic, and moral dominance for whites, effectively subordinating nonwhite populations. This contract is not a metaphorical distortion of liberal theory but an operative framework that structures inclusion, exclusion, and entitlement within political life. Under this framework, social contracts not only guide how society ought to be organized but also reflect how contemporary political and economic institutions have been forged through colonization, slavery, and exclusion. Mills illustrates how the Racial Contract is central to Western Political theory, grossly misrepresents the stark realities of the world, and upholds systems of inequality. 

This perspective reveals how the abstraction of Rawls’ framework obscures racial domination embedded in the foundation of liberal governance. As stated by Mills, Rawls’s work on justice contains “not a single reference to American slavery and its legacy,” despite its integral role in shaping social and political institutions. Mills argues that this absence is not incidental but constitutive of abstraction itself, which presents racial hierarchy as historically irrelevant rather than structurally foundational. This omission impacts policymaking by allowing for the assertion that justice can be realized through standalone, identity-blind reasoning. In this way, abstraction not only fails to account for racial justice but enables frameworks in which racialized disadvantage appears accidental or independent of the political order.

Mills employs the Racial Contract as a “conceptual bridge” to connect what is ubiquitous and exclusionary to the experience of those excluded. The bridge functions by making visible the background conditions that liberal theory treats as normatively neutral, exposing how universal principles are selectively applied. This clarifies which parts of the system are exclusionary and who is being excluded. It functions to cut through the idealized contract and its moral as well as theoretical justifications. Mills argues that a normative analysis for deconstructing rationalized oppression is necessary for reform, as failure to confront the historical and structural production of racial hierarchy risks stabilizing the very inequalities meant to be eliminated. Explaining that the lack of historical and structural context results in frameworks that appear fair while legitimizing unfair institutions. This is echoed by scholars in public administration, who argue that social equity frameworks rooted in Rawlsian neutrality omit the racialized origins of governance and policy in the United States. Both Mills and his contemporary counterparts illustrate how abstraction omits important historical realities that must be considered to prevent injustice rather than reproduce it.

A common objection to this critique holds that race-conscious decision-making itself produced historical injustices such as slavery and apartheid, raising the concern that contemporary race-conscious policies risk reproducing similar harms. Mills’ analysis directly contests this symmetry. He distinguishes between forms of race consciousness that naturalize hierarchy and those that seek to expose and dismantle it. Slavery and apartheid were not the result of an excessive attentiveness to race as a site of injustice, but of race being mobilized to justify domination and exclusion as morally legitimate. By contrast, race-conscious critique in Mills’ framework functions diagnostically rather than prescriptively: it identifies how racial hierarchy has been embedded in institutions that present themselves as neutral. In this sense, refusing to acknowledge race does not prevent racialized outcomes but allows historically produced inequalities to persist unchallenged. The risk, then, lies not in recognizing race as a structuring force, but in treating its effects as conceptually irrelevant to the pursuit of justice and policymaking.

Taken together, these critiques reveal a shared limitation within Rawlsian abstraction when applied to real-world policymaking. Sen demonstrates that justice cannot be assessed solely through the internal fairness of institutions, but must be evaluated in terms of how those institutions shape lived outcomes. Okin shows that treating social identity as immaterial obscures gendered structures of dependency and power that produce inequality long before individuals enter the public sphere. Mills further exposes how liberal social contract frameworks have historically bracketed race and colonial domination as conceptually irrelevant, thereby reproducing injustice under the guise of neutrality. Across these accounts, abstraction functions not as a safeguard against bias, but as a mechanism that can erase the experiences of those most affected by injustice. This convergence suggests that justice cannot be meaningfully realized without recognizing how social identity and structural difference condition access to opportunity, protection, and political voice.

Reimagining the Veil of Ignorance for Policymaking

Reimagined for contemporary policymaking, Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance can function as a method of informed empathy rather than identity-blindness. While the veil’s abstraction has theoretical utility as a moral exercise, its value lies in prompting policymakers to consider how laws and institutions would operate if they occupied positions of structural disadvantage, and whether this perspective would alter their decision-making. Under this interpretation, the veil shifts from an abstraction that obscures difference to a framework that illuminates how identity shapes access, opportunity, and equality.

Applied in this way, the veil offers a pragmatic orientation for policy design capable of engaging intersectional realities. By foregrounding how institutional complexity exacerbates epistemic barriers, policymakers can better identify where neutral features operate as structural obstacles. These barriers are not only the result of individual disengagement, but of institutional designs that presume stability, fluency, and access that many individuals do not possess. In healthcare, for instance, evaluating enrollment systems, coverage continuity, and provider access from the perspective of those lacking bureaucratic fluency or stable employment reveals disparities that formal neutrality conceals. Similarly, in criminal justice reform, policies governing bail, plea bargaining, and public defense can be assessed under the assumption that one might encounter the system with limited legal understanding and overburdened counsel, where due process exists in theory but not in practice. In this way, a reinterpreted veil prioritizes accessibility and structural awareness rather than neutrality alone. 

At the same time, this approach is not without limitations. It is unrealistic to expect policymakers to fully detach from their social positioning, and moral reasoning alone cannot overcome political partisanship, institutional inertia, or self-interest. Moreover, policies designed without explicit attention to identity risk reproducing injustice by failing to account for foundational disparities such as racialized wealth gaps or gendered power dynamics. For this reason, the veil operates most effectively in tandem with equity-oriented frameworks that consider race, gender, class, and ability. Reimagined in this way, the Veil of Ignorance exposes the epistemic challenges inherent in theories of justice that treat social identity as immaterial. When defining attributes such as race, language, gender, and social position are rendered irrelevant, the lived experiences of those most affected by injustice risk being erased under the guise of equality. Ignorance is seldom the solution when an understanding of the unique human experience of others works in tandem with justice. Genuine equity, therefore, requires not the erasure but the acknowledgment of social identity and structural difference. Through this modified Rawlsian lens, public policy can move beyond formal neutrality to confront structural injustice and cultivate informed empathy as a foundation for political practice.

Conclusion

John Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance remains one of the most influential and enduring moral frameworks in political philosophy, pioneering a method for imagining fairness under conditions of uncertainty and equality. And while it possesses merit in the theoretical aspect, justice cannot be realized through abstraction alone. When historical context, identity, and structural inequality are treated as immaterial, seemingly neutral frameworks can risk perpetuating the injustices they aim to eliminate. Through critiques of Sen, Mills, and Okin, the limitations of this abstraction are precisely identified, illustrating that justice must be evaluated by both the fairness of design and tangible outcomes in the lived experience.

Reimagined as a policy framework, the Veil of Ignorance can be leveraged for its theoretical benefit, enhancing the approach to just policymaking. It can serve as a precise practice of empathy, allowing policymakers to confront how institutions affect and function for those positioned within the margins of power. Pairing the Veil with an equity-focused approach that accounts for race, gender, class, ability, and historical disadvantage positions its impartiality as an advantage. It facilitates conditions where policy can intersectionally address issues with an adapted moral lens. Thus, justice is no longer an idealized neutrality but a feasible commitment to equity. Policymaking informed by this reinterpreted framework moves the needle toward an ideal of fairness that is tethered to reality and supported in practice.

References

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Moloney, Kim, and Christopher Lewis. “The Flawed Foundations of Social Equity in Public Administration: A Racial Contract Theory Critique.” Public Administration Review 84, no. 1 (2024): 45–58.

Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.