A Consideration of the Moral Merits of Rawls’ Original Position
	There are several characteristics of the original position which Rawls seems to believe make the choice of the two principles of justice morally significant. As I read them, they are primarily impartiality, equality, rationality and universality. In this paper I will briefly relate how I understand Rawls’ application of these values to the original position. I will then proceed to criticize the way that Rawls attempts use these moral values to make his two principles of justice unquestionable outside of the original position. My criticism focuses around Rawls supreme faith in reason as a universal basis for moral judgment. I believe that because reason is the basis of his original position, but is in fact not an absolute or transcendent value, his attribution of supreme importance to the original position is unfounded.
	First, impartiality is a principle which Rawls believes gives choice in the original position moral weight. By the nature of the definition of the original position, including the veil of ignorance, each the participants in the original position is unaware of what their fate will actually be in a world which is based on the principles of justice which they are attempting to choose. Rawls believes that this makes their choice impartial and hence fair. Each person supposedly will not choose a principle which might disadvantage them more than it might advantage them.
	Equality is also a morally relevant factor for Rawls’ original position. Each one of the theoretical people in the original position is equal to each other by the very definition of the state. They each have equal capacities, especially for reasoning. They also all have interests, though they are not aware of what they are. This equality makes the original position morally superior because none are allowed to take advantage of the others due to any sort of superiority of knowledge or resources that they might have outside the original position.
	A third morally significant factor is that of rationality. Though Rawls does not specifically mention this factor, he seems to consider it self evidently good. The original position is defined as a process of rational decision making in which all participants reason in exactly the same manner to reach the same conclusion. Therefore the conclusions made in the original position have the virtue of being totally consistent. Furthermore rationality, aside from being intrinsically good, reflects the actual condition, in Rawls opinion, of those outside the veil of ignorance. 
	Fourth and lastly, conclusions reached from the original position inside the veil of ignorance are by their nature universalizable. Since the process of making a decision is the same for all rational people, therefore the conclusion also applies to all people. The conclusions’ applicability is not dependent on a particular person’s actual participation in the process of reasoning in the theoretical original position, but rather necessarily applies to all people due to their basic rationality. In other words, Rawls believes that all people who reason in good faith from the original position will come to his conclusion.
	Given these for factors, and perhaps even closely related ones, Rawls may be justified in believing that the original position has some moral merit. However, it hardly seems that these factors can imbue the choices made in the original position with unquestionable moral authority. Rawls sees the principles of justice as being absolutely unquestionable from outside of the original position. This sort of extreme position would likely draw derision from Rawls when the unquestionable authority is God. However if the authority is Reason exercised in the original position, then he is perfectly fine endorsing it.
	Rawls might answer that this original position is available to everyone and thus merits agreement on it edicts whereas God’s moral judgment is not available. However, two facts undermine this response. First, there many people of different faiths who believe that God’s moral judgment is accessible to people through various means including reason. Second, there are many people who do not agree that Reason as defined by the Enlightenment is actually “universally accessible.” I agree with both of these responses, but want to specifically address the second. In studying ethics at Yale Divinity School I have had first hand experience of people making statements about things which they believed were self evidently true about the nature of the world. Some of these statements I agreed with, others I did not, but after speaking with people about their experiences which lead them to see the world in that manner, I could not simply say that they were being “unreasonable.” I have found myself in similar cases as well, where I was forced to admit that reasonable people took an opposite and supposedly self evident position. It is not that people are mislead or reasoning in bad faith. People reasoning in good faith based on principles rooted in their experience come to different conclusions about the basic nature of the world.
	Rawls apparently wants to disregard this facet of reality and claim that only those that reason as he does are correct and morally right. He frames the very essence of his argument so as to exclude those who take experience to be a serious source of information to for reasoning. He alienates social science from it basis in actual empiricism, also know as experience, and treats it as Truth for his reasoning in the original position. Only someone with a blind faith in Reason and fear of experience and the actual complexities of life could take this sort of approach.
	In conclusion, Rawls attempts to show that the original position has certain morally praiseworthy aspects which make its conclusions not subject to question by those outside of its bounds. However, as I have briefly argued, those bounds are both too tight and arbitrarily founded on Reason as an absolute principle. It is clear that reasonable people do come to different conclusions based on their experience and beliefs about the nature of the world. Rawls attempts to exclude these experiences and beliefs as unreasonable, but without them, it is unclear what one may work from as first principles. Rawls inclusion of social science as Truth for the basis of reasoning is clearly unfounded and in fact counter-scientific. The merit of any “truth” of science is lost when it is alienated from the actual situation which produced the data.
	I am not accusing Rawls of reasoning in bad faith, as he might accuse me. I acknowledge that he does in fact believe that his premises are self evident to all “reasonable” people and that his conclusions follow from them. However, it is self evident to me that reasoning based on defining the reasonable person as the one who agrees with oneself is fundamentally flawed and potentially dangerous, especially if it is moved into the category of unquestionable truth.