IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-00469112.html

Is the Veil of Ignorance Transparent ?
[Le voile d’ignorance est-il transparent ?]

Author

Listed:
  • Gaël Giraud

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

  • Cécile Renouard

    (ESSEC PhD Program - ESSEC PhD Program - ESSEC Business School, ESSEC Business School)

Abstract

Theories of justice in the spirit of Rawls and Harsanyi argue that fair-minded people should aspire to make choices for society as if in the original position, that is, behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing their own social positions in society. In this paper, we provide a framework showing that preferences in front of the veil of ignorance (i.e., in face of everyday risky situations) are entirely determined by ethical preferences behind the veil. Moreover, by contrast with Kariv & Zame (2008), in many cases of interest, the converse is not true : ethical decisions cannot be deduced from economic ones. This not only rehabilitates distributive theories of justice but even proves that standard decision theory in economic environments cannot be separated from ethical questioning.

Suggested Citation

  • Gaël Giraud & Cécile Renouard, 2010. "Is the Veil of Ignorance Transparent ? [Le voile d’ignorance est-il transparent ?]," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00469112, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00469112
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00469112v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00469112v1/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. İbrahim Erdem SEÇİLMİŞ, 2014. "Seniority: A Blessing or A Curse? The Effect of Economics Training on the Perception of Distributive Justice," Sosyoekonomi Journal, Sosyoekonomi Society, issue 22(22).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00469112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.