Justice and practical reason: Rationality, reasonableness, and thought-experimenting in Rawls

Rawls’s central work, A Theory of Justice, is famously built around a thought experiment, the famous Original Position. It continues the tradition of hypothetical understanding of the social contract, enriching it with a new methodological tool, the introduction of the Veil of Ignorance. The Veil, the central thought experiment of Rawls’s work, finely illustrates the road from merely instrumental rationality to the higher level, characterized by Rawls as “reasonableness”. Rawls is here quite consistent throughout half a century of his reflections. Here we propose the reading in terms of layers–degrees of rationality in the wide sense, that is, the reading in terms of the reasonable and the rational in the narrow sense