[Penn]

Source JSTOR

Veil Of Ignorance
The "veil of ignorance", along with the original position, is a method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following thought experiment: parties to the original position know nothing about the particular abilities, tastes, and positions individuals will have within a social order. When such parties are selecting the principles for distribution of rights, positions, and resources in the society in which they will live, the veil of ignorance prevents them from knowing who will receive a given distribution of rights, positions, and resources in that society. For example, for a proposed society in which 50% of the population is kept in slavery, it follows that on entering the new society there is a 50% likelihood that the participant would be a slave. The idea is that parties subject to the veil of ignorance will make choices based upon moral considerations, since they will not be able to make choices based on self- or class-interest. As John Rawls put it, "no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like." The idea of the thought experiment is to render obsolete those personal considerations that are morally irrelevant to the justice or injustice of principles meant to allocate the benefits of social cooperation. The veil of ignorance is part of a long tradition of thinking in terms of a social contract. The writings of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson offer examples of this tradition

Distributive Justice
Distributive justice concerns the nature of a socially just allocation of goods in a society. A society in which incidental inequalities in outcome do not arise would be considered a society guided by the principles of distributive justice. The concept includes the available quantities of goods, the process by which goods are to be distributed, and the resulting allocation of the goods to the members of the society. Often contrasted with just process, which is concerned with the administration of law, distributive justice concentrates on outcomes. This subject has been given considerable attention in philosophy and the social sciences. In social psychology, distributive justice is defined as perceived fairness of how rewards and costs are shared by (distributed across) group members. For example, when workers of the same job are paid different salaries, group members may feel that distributive justice has not occurred. To determine whether distributive justice has taken place, individuals often turn to the distributive norms of their group. A norm is the standard of behaviour that is required, desired, or designated as normal within a particular group. If rewards and costs are allocated according to the designated distributive norms of the group, distributive justice has occurred.

Utilitarianism
(This article discusses utilitarian ethical theory. For a discussion of John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism, see Utilitarianism (book). For the architectural theory, see Utilitarianism (architecture)) Utilitarianism is a theory about what we ought to do. It states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility. "Utility" is defined in various ways, usually in terms of the well-being of sentient entities, such as human beings and other animals. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, gave this definition of "utility": it is the sum of all pleasure that results from an action, minus the suffering of anyone involved in the action. The philosopher John Stuart Mill developed this concept further. He included not only the quantity of the pleasure, but also the quality of pleasure. He focused on rules, instead of individual actions. Others have proposed a theory called "negative utilitarianism." They define utility only in terms of suffering. Utilitarianism is a version of what Elizabeth Anscombe called "consequentialism". Consequentialism states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Contrast this view with virtue ethics, which enshrines virtue as a moral good. Some believe that one's intentions are also ethically important. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism, utilitarianism considers all interests equally. Proponents of utilitarianism have disagreed on a number of points. Should individual acts should conform to utility (act utilitarianism)? Or, should agents conform to ethical rules (rule utilitarianism)? Should utility should be calculated as an aggregate (total utilitarianism) or as an average (average utilitarianism)? Though the seeds of the theory can be found in the hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good, the tradition of utilitarianism properly begins with Bentham, and has included John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare and Peter Singer. It has been applied the suffering of non-human animals, and the ethics of raising animals for food. Opponents of utilitarianism have raised a number of objections. Some say that utilitarianism ignores justice. Others call it impractical. Specific criticisms have included the mere addition paradox and the utility monster.