What is the 'original position' according to Rawls?

Rawls calls the original position a hypothetical situation. It consists of certain "essential features," the key of which is that a person does not know what their position will be in the new society being constructed. They do not know what class they will end up in, what their status will be, or if they will be rich or poor, abled or disabled. They also do not know how intelligent or strong they will be. They do not have a preexisting idea of what justice looks like, and they do not know what their psychological makeup will be.

Rawls calls this original position the veil of ignorance. In other words, people will devise a system of justice that will not be influenced by any prior knowledge of where their place in their society will be. This means they will not have an incentive to unfairly privilege themselves. As Rawls puts it,

The original position is, one might say, the appropriate initial status quo, and thus the fundamental agreements reached in it are fair.

In other words, if you don't know if you will be at the top or the bottom of the social system you are devising, you will want a system that is as fair as possible to all elements of society.

This concept of original position is often used in conflict resolution. For example, if two businesses are fighting over how to divide a piece of property, they will often be asked to create a division without knowing which half they will get. This leads to people trying to devise the most just division. Rawls is simply saying that to be fair, an original position or starting point for building a good society has to be one of ignorance of one's own place in it.

In Rawls' A Theory of Justice, what is the original position?  

The original position is the perspective that a hypothetical creator of a society must adopt in order to ensure that the society will be just.

Rawls argues that a just society would be one that was devised by someone who was in the original position.  This person would have to set up the society without knowing what position he or she would have in it.  Such a person would set up a society where even the poorest and least privileged people would have basic rights and would have enough to live on.  The person in the original position would do this because he/she might potentially end up with the lowest status in the society.

The original position, then, is the perspective of the hypothetical person who is creating a society but does not know what place he or she will hold in that society.  Of course, this is not meant as a description of something that has actually happened in human history.  Instead, it is meant as a way of evaluating the justice of a given society's basic systems.

What is the basis of equality in the original position according to Rawls?

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls describes the original position as an impartial viewpoint which allows those who adopt it to make disinterested decisions about justice. The original position is an ideal, and Rawls is not suggesting, as some commentators have alleged, that there was a point in history when it was universal or widespread in reality. In practice, most of the decisions people make are and have always been self-interested. This means that they are based on inequality, since people decide ethical questions based on how they personally will be affected.

The basis of equality among those in the original position is the "veil of ignorance," a thought experiment devised by Rawls to facilitate impartial decisions about how society ought to be governed. Behind the veil of ignorance, one has no idea what position one will occupy in a society. The decision maker might be rich or poor, male or female, Black or White, able-bodied or disabled. This ignorance removes the element of self-interest from decisions about justice, since the decision maker cannot decide in the interests of the group to which they happen to belong. Those in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, are, therefore, theoretically making decisions on a basis of absolute equality.

What is the Original Position in Rawls's theory of justice and does it achieve its goals?

In the Original Position that he developed in A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues against the motivations of self-interest, claiming that a veil of ignorance would fundamentally affect people’s idea of justice.

After the original book, published in 1971, Rawls expanded on his ideas about fairness in 1985. Rawls considers that justice is based on maximizing the amount of liberty enjoyed by the members of a given society. This ideal maximum is limited only by the infringement on another member’s liberty.

Another fundamental tenet is that inequality should also be limited to an approximation of equality: no members of society should become worse off through unequal distribution of resources than they would be if the distribution were equal. A related aspect of inequality is access to power through governance.

Rawls uses the Original Position to argue that if people do not know certain facts about themselves, they cannot use that information to gain power or personal advantage. This information includes class position, distribution of natural abilities such as intelligence or personality, and even their moral precepts. His idea is that such ignorance would keep people from privileging members of their own group, such as a class.

Basing justice on such a position can be seen as flawed because it does not explain how people can be kept in ignorance of such basic information other than through powerful members of society suppressing that information.