Matthew. I appreciate this attempt, truly, and I find myself daily torn between evils. I am Jewish, and something of an intellectual grandchild of Rawls, having been a teaching assistant in grad school for a political theory professor at MIT who studied with Rawls at Harvard. The weakness in the argument is the specific application of the argument that is more general about the original position: it is ahistorical and thus an unfulfilling fulcrum for discussions of justice. What is just in this circumstance is not an abstraction, but follows from what has previously transpired. One can't simply strip away history and make the call in the abstract about specific applications. Rawls applied the veil of ignorance only to the basic structures of society -- the constitutional structure. (I would not hesitate to say that behind the veil of ignorance, everyone would desire self-determination, and would further desire the protections against tyranny of the majority, as he argued.) One further note, Rawls (like all of us liberals) does not handle well the question of how to treat the intolerant. That to me is a great unsolved problem in justice. thanks for posting. Dave