Both Closed and Empty Individualism posit that consciousness comes into being at some point, either when they are born or at the beginning of a time-slice of consciousness. As soon as a consciousness begins to exist it can be viewed as someone leaving the veil of ignorance and finding out what kind of experience they’ll have.
There is no “you” before coming into existence under closed/empty conditions, so it is categorically false that you are “leaving” anything or “finding out” anything. This makes your assertion that “from behind the veil of ignorance, we’d want the people in society to be making sure we don’t enter into bad experiences when we leave the veil of ignorance” obviously false, because your implication that there is a really existing veil of influence rests on birth functioning as a kind of “soul lottery” rather than the creation of a sentient entity.
Understood correctly, as Rawls writes in A Theory of Justice, the veil of ignorance is a hypothetical thought experiment. Your attempts to ground this in an analogy to the process of coming into existence muddle the ontological issues and provide a Pareto downgrade from Rawl’s original formulation.
Given that you take away that implication as well as others, I think I worded this in a way that makes it seem like I think there’s actually-in-reality some kind of “soul lottery”, when I agree that it is a thought experiment. I recently became aware of Peter Singer’s “Point of view of the universe” which, from my brief contact with the idea, gets at what I was trying to say here better than I did.
There is no “you” before coming into existence under closed/empty conditions, so it is categorically false that you are “leaving” anything or “finding out” anything. This makes your assertion that “from behind the veil of ignorance, we’d want the people in society to be making sure we don’t enter into bad experiences when we leave the veil of ignorance” obviously false, because your implication that there is a really existing veil of influence rests on birth functioning as a kind of “soul lottery” rather than the creation of a sentient entity.
Understood correctly, as Rawls writes in A Theory of Justice, the veil of ignorance is a hypothetical thought experiment. Your attempts to ground this in an analogy to the process of coming into existence muddle the ontological issues and provide a Pareto downgrade from Rawl’s original formulation.
Given that you take away that implication as well as others, I think I worded this in a way that makes it seem like I think there’s actually-in-reality some kind of “soul lottery”, when I agree that it is a thought experiment. I recently became aware of Peter Singer’s “Point of view of the universe” which, from my brief contact with the idea, gets at what I was trying to say here better than I did.