The veil of ig­no­rance

One of the best episodes of Doctor Who is “The Day of the Doctor”, where the B-story is about shapeshift­ing aliens called Zygons who are refugees from their home planet. They hide in frozen-time sta­sis on Earth, wait­ing for it to be­come a suit­able home (which I pre­sume means we have wi-fi), and some­time around the year 2013, the Zygons awake to dis­cover that their hid­ing spots (three-dimensional paint­ings, natch) have been iden­ti­fied as ex­trater­res­trial in ori­gin and are now in the cus­tody of global in­tel­li­gence task-force UNIT.

We learn that UNIT main­tains a su­per-se­cret “Black Archive” of all such ob­jects that they know about, which in the Who-niverse is quite a lot, and many of them are ex­tremely dan­ger­ous and a few timestream-ma­nip­u­late-y.¹ In fact, knowl­edge of the Archive is so guarded that it is rigged with mem­ory wip­ing de­vices; even its se­cu­rity guard, on his tenth year of duty, still be­lieves it’s his first day on the job. The Zygons learn pretty quickly they can shapeshift into UNIT per­son­nel, in­clud­ing de­part­ment chief Kate Stewart, walk right into the Archive, and gain con­trol over any num­ber of highly-clas­si­fied de­vices they’d need to take over Earth.

When she fig­ures out what’s hap­pen­ing, the real Kate Stewart is none too pleased. With her as­sis­tant Osgood, she storms into the Archive, con­fronts her dop­pel­ganger, and ini­ti­ates a self-de­struct:

KATE: You’ll re­alise there are pro­to­cols pro­tect­ing this place. Osgood?

OSGOOD: In the event of any alien in­cur­sion, the con­tents of this room are deemed so dan­ger­ous, it will self-de­struct in—

KATE: Five min­utes.

The alarm sounds and the count­down starts.

KATE: There’s a nu­clear war­head twenty feet be­neath us. Are you sit­ting com­fort­ably?

ZYGON KATE: You would de­stroy London?

KATE: To save the world, yes, I would.

This riles The Doctor. Actually, this riles two Doctors. Oh yeah, so the main sto­ry­line is that there are three Doctors from dif­fer­ent in­car­na­tions of the show at the same time. But that’s not im­por­tant right now. For the uni­ti­ated, the thing you have to know about The Doctor is that he’s a thou­sand-some­thing-year-old Time Lord who looks hu­man, has a time ma­chine re­sem­bling an an­cient British po­lice phone box, and al­though he can go any­where at any point in his­tory, he mostly just hangs around twenty-first cen­tury London. Most im­por­tantly, he ab­hors vi­o­lence, and he’s fu­ri­ous that Kate would sac­ri­fice mil­lions of lives.

Meanwhile, the Kates con­tinue to wres­tle over the self-de­struct.

ZYGON KATE: One word from you would can­cel the count­down.

KATE: Quite so.

ZYGON KATE: It’s keyed to your voice­print.

KATE: And mine alone.

ZYGON KATE: Cancel the det­o­na­tion!

KATE: Countermanded!

ZYGON KATE: Cancel the det­o­na­tion!

KATE: Countermanded!

ZYGON KATE: We only have to agree to live.

KATE: Sadly, we can only agree to die.

So The Doctor fig­ures out a way into the Black Archive (which nor­mally has pro­tec­tions against his time ma­chine from in­fil­trat­ing it—there’s trust is­sues here) and begs Kate—both Kates, as he does­n’t know which is which—to stop the count­down so that mil­lions of in­no­cent Londoners don’t need to die.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: I’m go­ing to make you get it right.

KATE: How?

TENTH DOCTOR: Any sec­ond now, you’re go­ing to stop that count­down. Both of you, to­gether.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: Then you’re go­ing to ne­go­ti­ate the most per­fect treaty of all time.

TENTH DOCTOR: Safeguards all round, com­pletely fair on both sides.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: And the key to per­fect ne­go­ti­a­tion?

TENTH DOCTOR: Not know­ing what side you’re on.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: So, for the next few hours, un­til we de­cide to let you out—

TENTH DOCTOR: —no one in this room will be able to re­mem­ber if they’re hu­man—

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: —or Zygon.

The Doctors jump on to the table and ac­ti­vate their sonic screw­drivers, which trig­gers the mem­ory fil­ters. The count­down reaches 7 as the Kates and their as­sis­tants look be­fud­dled, no longer aware of who they are.

BOTH KATES: Cancel the det­o­na­tion!

It stops at 5.

ELEVENTH DOCTOR: Peace in our time.

This works be­cause the shapeshift­ing Zygons also take on the mem­ory and per­son­al­ity of their dop­pel­gangers, so with parts of their mem­ory tem­porar­ily dis­abled, they each be­lieve they’re the same per­son, with equal chance of be­ing hu­man or Zygon in the end.

I loved the idea that a per­fect ne­go­ti­a­tion is pos­si­ble if both sides fully knew the in­ter­ests of ei­ther party, but did­n’t know which party they’re ar­gu­ing for. Years later, I learned this was for­mal­ized in phi­los­o­phy by John Rawls’s con­cept of the “veil of ig­no­rance.”

CUNY pro­fes­sor Massimo Pigliucci writes in his blog, Rationally Speaking:

Rawls started out with the idea that jus­tice can be con­ceived as fair­ness, and that there­fore a just so­ci­ety has to set up its gov­ern­ing rules (its so­cial con­tract) to be as fair as pos­si­ble. Of course, the prob­lem even with ra­tio­nal peo­ple (let alone slightly ir­ra­tional ones, as is far more com­mon) try­ing to ar­rive at an agree­ment is that usu­ally the ne­go­ti­at­ing table is im­bal­anced… So, how do we go about set­ting up a ra­tio­nal just so­ci­ety given the (rather ra­tio­nal, if not just) propen­sity of hu­man be­ings to take ad­van­tage of what­ever their cur­rent po­si­tion hap­pens to of­fer?

Rawls pos­tu­lated this thought ex­per­i­ment: imag­ine that every­one, be­fore they are born, oc­cu­pies some kind of mul­ti­player game lobby. Everyone fully un­der­stands the na­ture of the world they’re about to en­ter, but can­not choose which char­ac­ter they’re about to play. Thus, a small frac­tion of peo­ple will be very rich, while a larger pro­por­tion will be very poor; some peo­ple will be born with life-threat­en­ing ge­netic con­di­tions and oth­ers will be be­stowed with stronger con­sti­tu­tions; still oth­ers given lower in­tel­li­gence or higher in­tel­li­gence. And then there’s race and gen­der: for in­stance, one has a roughly 50-50 chance of be­ing male or fe­male, but some per­cent­age of peo­ple will land out­side the gen­der bi­nary.

There’s no pre­dict­ing what bun­dle of char­ac­ter­is­tics one ends up hav­ing, and no way to in­flu­ence the re­sult. What the “players” can con­trol, though, are the rules of the game be­fore it starts. So, every­one works to­gether to de­sign so­ci­ety be­fore they are born into it, and then, once every­one agrees on what those rules are, poof, those rules are fixed in place, you are born, and then you live your life.

Theoretically, this leads to a more egal­i­tar­ian so­ci­ety: since the odds are low that some­one will be born in the most-priv­i­leged class (say: 1% chance), then all play­ers, as­sum­ing the like­li­hood that they will not be priv­i­leged, should find it in their best in­ter­est to set the rules of so­ci­ety such that the other 99% aren’t suf­fer­ing.

In this so­ci­ety, there’s no priv­i­leged class ne­go­ti­at­ing from a po­si­tion of power, writ­ing the rules to ben­e­fit only them­selves, pre­serv­ing their sta­tus at the ex­pense of every­one else. In this so­ci­ety, a healthy sup­port sys­tem and safety net ex­ists to take care of every­one.

Such is the na­ture of the Kates’ treaty: with ei­ther Kate hav­ing a 50-50 chance of be­ing ei­ther a hu­man or Zygon, the de­bate is no longer about who gets to take over the world and who gets to blow up London. Both are forced to ne­go­ti­ate a po­si­tion where they might turn out to be ei­ther per­son and still be happy with the out­come.

Unfortunately, there is no “veil of ig­no­rance” for real life. However, Rawls was try­ing to pro­vide a ra­tio­nal case for so­cial jus­tice in a world where dif­fer­ences do ex­ist and peo­ple do have clear ad­van­tages or dis­ad­van­tages.

The out­come of the Kates’ “most per­fect treaty of all time” does not come up again un­til Series 9′s two-parter “The Zygon Invasion” / “The Zygon Inversion”. In those episodes, Doctor Who throws a wrench into the Rawlsian sim­u­la­tion, ob­serv­ing that, once the “players” en­tered the post-treaty world, en­forc­ing the agree­ment is a whole nother mat­ter. Someone might try to change the rules to pro­vide them­selves with a greater ad­van­tage, or de­cide to re­nege on the con­tract that they made.

As com­men­tary on the veil of ig­no­rance, Doctor Who sug­gests that such a ne­go­ti­a­tion can­not hap­pen just once, and that the choice to be eq­ui­table must be con­sciously made, over and over again.² Justice is not a di­vine watch­maker; no one can de­sign the per­fect sys­tem up front to run in per­pe­tu­ity. Entropy and chaos take over, mag­ni­fy­ing the ag­gre­ga­tion of lit­tle im­per­fec­tions, un­til they are pow­er­ful enough to up­end the en­tire sys­tem. Luckily for the Who-universe, they have the cor­rec­tive, time-ma­nip­u­lat­ing force of The Doctor. Here, we only have our­selves.