Rawls Game character cards. Photo provided by the authors.

Editable character cards for this game are available for download at the end of this post.

The genius of John Rawls’s Original Position thought experiment is that it retains the self-interestedness of competitive politics, but forces us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of anyone and everyone. Whatever the issue, the goal is to ensure we’re adequately cared for and respected, not overly burdened or frustrated, yet we have no idea who we are. This doesn’t completely eliminate the influence of personal bias, but it does decrease it, delivering results that are more objectively fair and morally defensible.

To more effectively teach students how to apply Rawls’s methodology, in the spring semester of 2026, we developed and piloted a “Rawls Game” for our Intro to Philosophy and Intro to Ethics classes at Pellissippi State Community College in East Tennessee. Our goal was to illustrate how Rawls’s Original Position thought experiment can be used to theorize the basic structure of a just society for free equals, and how it can be a useful tool for transcending bias when thinking through most any issue. In the process, we created a printable resource we are proud to share with the philosophical community.

Game Development

With a rough vision in mind, we researched existing Rawls games and came across a version developed by philosopher Brian P. Palmiter. While expertly detailed, we decided Palmiter’s game would be too complicated and time-consuming for our 100-level survey courses. Palmiter’s game uses variables to determine what kinds of jobs and goods each player can access, and then asks students to calculate their utility at the end. Rather than giving out character cards with numbered variables, we wanted quick-reference visuals to make analysis less intimidating and more intuitive, and for the process to be fast enough for students to work through three to four issues in a single class. In addition to simplifying the system, we also wanted to use this exercise to get students to think about the real human stories that exist behind each character affected by the policies they choose. However, for a higher-level philosophy course, and especially for a devoted political philosophy course, Palmiter’s is an excellent option.

As fans of Alain de Botton’s School of Life books, videos, and other learning materials, we took inspiration from The Dilemmas Game, as well as Dead Theorists: A Card Game for Disillusioned Philosophers and Aspiring Academics, and Existential Comics. Our results weren’t as insightful, artistic, or funny, but we do credit these sources for their encouragement to make philosophy more accessible and fun. Finally, we borrowed University of Michigan Associate Professor Renée Jørgensen’s Rawls art for the side of the cards opposite the characters’ details. I (Deaton) have the same print displayed in my home office, my primary classroom, and on one of my favorite t-shirts. Rawls fans can get their own Jørgensen philosophy art online here. 

Working as a team, we drafted character sets for groups of six students to apply Rawls’s Original Position to healthcare, immigration, firearms, taxation, and abortion. The idea was to randomly assign cards face down, such that students would know they were representing someone with interests at stake, yet be blocked from knowing who that person was, what their interests were, and how various policy proposals would impact them. They’d discuss healthcare, immigration, firearms, taxation, and abortion laws with a character card in front of them, yet have no idea the plight of the person they were charged with representing. Then, only after selecting a policy, would their character’s identity be revealed.

Palmiter’s Rawls game follows a similar strategy with similar aims, but the post-character reveal test involves a detailed personal utility and social contribution analysis. Our approach, on the other hand, was to simply invite the groups to share their characters’ traits and discuss which would be more or less honored and pleased versus disrespected and frustrated. For example, the healthcare policy character cards included Ricky, an unemployed, homeless man with type 1 diabetes in need of daily insulin to survive, as well as Taya, a federal management analyst with excellent healthcare worried that expanding coverage would increase her taxes. If a group’s pre-reveal policy accounted for people like Ricky, he’d presumably be happy. But if their policy included aggressive taxes on the middle class to pay for that coverage, Taya might be frustrated. Or consider the immigration character set, which included Maria, an undocumented farm worker, as well as Officer Grant, a border patrol agent whose partner was killed in a cartel raid, Larry, a factory worker worried about immigrants driving down wages, or Ricardo, an aspiring immigrant hoping to improve his quality of life in the US as a professional youth soccer coach. Obviously, adequately honoring all parties’ legitimate interests can be tough. But trying, while not knowing which character you represent, is what makes the approach uniquely valuable.

How to Play

1. Divide: Divide the class into groups of six.
2. Deal: Randomly deal character cards face down, ensuring the cards within each group are on the same issue (one group of six with the immigration policy set, another group with the firearms policy set, etc.).
3. Discuss: Give the group 5-to-10 minutes to articulate a broad policy on that issue that they believe would honor their interests regardless of who they happen to be. (During the first round, they’re likely to still promote whatever policy they personally prefer. It’s likely they’ll need to go through the reveal process at least once before catching on.)
4. Reveal: Have the students turn their cards over, read their details silently first, then take turns sharing them aloud, discussing as a group which characters would be most honored, most frustrated.
5. Revise: *Optional* One optional step is to invite the students to revise their policy with the characters now known. You can turn them face down and randomly re-deal them to prevent anyone from adopting the interests of their initially assigned character. But now knowing the range of interests at stake, they’re more likely to converge on a policy able to accommodate all characters’ most pressing needs.
6. Rotate: Collect the character sets and rotate them to the next group (immigration set is passed to the group that was doing firearms, firearms set is passed to the group that was doing abortion, etc.).
7. Compare: *Optional* At the end, have the groups write their policies (draft, final, or both) on the board, then as a class discuss which seems best per each issue in light of the Rawlsian approach. Rank or score them (perhaps on a scale of 1-5 according to how satisfied the characters would be per issue), tally points, and declare an overall winning team.

Lessons Learned

We piloted the game with two different groups of students over several class periods, and can share four main lessons.

1: Make your intro brief and devote as much time as possible to the game itself. I (Deaton) began my Rawls class by explaining the Original Position and Veil of Ignorance. I had pre-assigned Rawls’s classic article, “Justice as Fairness: Political, Not Metaphysical,” as well as a 20-minute Rawls overview video based on Michael Sandel’s Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? I reviewed much of what I had explained in the video, briefly applying the Original Position to wealth distribution schemes, ruling out a feudal system lacking class mobility, laissez-faire Libertarianism, which would neglect the disadvantaged, and strict egalitarianism (enforced equal income and wealth distribution) in favor of maximin and Rawls’s Difference Principle (allowing unequal income and wealth distributions so long as the least well-off group is better off than they would be under another distribution). While this felt necessary to ensure the students understood the approach, it took twenty-five minutes, which, in an eighty-minute class, proved too much to combine with four rounds of the Rawls game. By the end, I was rushing and still didn’t have enough time for students to report out or for us to score and rank their draft and revised policies. So, lesson 1: when previewing Rawls, get to the point quickly, because the game will take time, and playing it does a much better job of teaching Rawls than a lecture—there’s no need to belabor what will soon be obvious.

2: If you use abortion, some students will protest if an Unborn Developing Human (UDH) isn’t one of the characters (I [Deaton] use this neutral term in lieu of the pro-choice slanted “fetus” or pro-life slanted “baby”). We didn’t include one in our original abortion policy character card set, primarily because no rational, self-advocating Original Position Agent could be a member of the unborn, for the unborn can’t converse until several years after birth, and can’t reason until several additional years later. Rawls cast the Original Position thought experiment as a way to imagine how free equals would select foundational principles of justice. As we picture Original Position agents thinking about their unknown interests, talents, weaknesses, commitments, etc., we can imagine one thinking, “Well, I don’t know much about who I am, but one thing I know for sure is that since I’m having this complicated conversation with myself, I’m surely not a UDH!” While a reasoner behind the Veil of Ignorance couldn’t know if they were rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, citizen or immigrant, they could conclude that they’re not in utero, they’re not a newborn, and must be past a certain age of normal language and reasoning development. They might also self-validate psychological stability and conclude that they don’t need psychiatric care, or rule out the risk of severe intellectual disabilities. One way to interpret this is as a weakness of the Original Position. If reasoners behind the Veil are expected to be purely self-interested, and we think young children, UDHs, those with intensive care needs, etc. deserve an equal seat at the policy decision-making table, maybe this is reason to temper our enthusiasm for the heuristic or concede its limitations. This seems to have been Rawls’s own approach. He excluded non-human animals from the Veil, but maintained that they were morally valuable nevertheless, due compassion and consideration. However, one strategy we could take, which others, such as Sidney Callahan with abortion, have taken, is to imagine advocates arguing on behalf of parties who can’t reason for themselves: UDHs, factory-farmed chickens, possibly even the environment itself. So, this could add a nice layer to classroom discussions. Rather than ruling out all but able-bodied adults of sound mind, a facilitator could simply run a revised thought experiment where any party someone might argue deserves to be treated as a free equal as a matter of justice (whether they’re equal in capacities or not) is appointed trustees to reason for them, and then consider the policy implications. Perhaps those differences will be so unattractive that students will agree to treat those parties with compassion—due moral consideration—yet not due equal standing as a matter of justice. Either way, re-running the analysis with appointed advocates would show the flexibility of the approach, even if it strays from Rawls’s original intent.

3: Choose a scope for students’ policies, and make that clear. There can be a lot of variation in how students go about forming policies, with some wanting to do a lot of research and feeling overwhelmed, and others coming up with broad policies that really do not respond to the realities of the world. While I (Pandolfi) liked the diversity of approaches that I saw, I found that this created some confusion in what they were being asked to do, and it created an excessive variance in how long each group took to get finished. I would recommend deciding how long you want students to take on each issue, and then frame the problem for your students accordingly. There are characters in the set that are clearly taken from current American society (the border patrol agent, the unhoused person, the factory worker concerned about immigrants driving down wages, etc.). In some of my classes, this created confusion as to whether the policies they created needed to be tethered to the realities of the US or not. For groups who chose to take this prompt as truly starting from scratch, some characters simply couldn’t exist (like the border patrol agent in a full-scale open border society), or salaries had to be adjusted due to economic policies the group chose. I would recommend that professors make it clear to students the level of imagination they can use, and then adjust characters and decide on deliberation time accordingly. I found that this exercise was very fruitful for both those designing policy that they would wish to see in the US as well as those starting a society from scratch, but these offer different benefits and require different amounts of time, with the more realistic approaches requiring more time.

4: A post-game reflection session can be an incredibly valuable way to solidify the lessons. It is definitely not necessary, but if you can accommodate it, I (Pandolfi) highly recommend it. Because of the timing in my semester, I was able to dedicate about half of a class period to talking about what we learned from the game. During this time, students were able to reflect on both the values they saw enacted in the game, as well as the parameters of the exercise itself. This is a very valuable way to introduce the difference between ideal and non-ideal theory, and initiate a discussion with students about the value of constructing ideals in the first place. This exercise combines both the forming of ideal principles with the application of those principles to realistic people, providing a very direct way for students to experience both the value and shortcomings of ideal approaches to justice. Inevitably, there will be students who think “that sounds nice and all, but none of this can be applied without looking at the real constraints that exist in the real world.” Offering support for this critique by discussing the difference between ideal and non-ideal theory can elevate the discussion of the Veil of Ignorance method, allowing students to consider how and when we ought to use ideal thinking versus more applied thinking. I would especially recommend this to anyone who already follows up Rawls with critiques from feminist or non-ideal thinkers.

Conclusion

Explaining the novelty and helpfulness of Rawls’s approach in the abstract is possible. But the character cards, which not only personalize various parties’ plights, but tie them to specific students, make it more vivid and easier to understand. The risk of your character losing big piques students’ latent competitiveness, making what might have been a dry lecture an engaging, fun, and memorable experience.

Should you accept the challenge to use the Rawls game in your class, feel free to edit our characters and add new ones. If you create a new set you’re proud of, please look us up online and send them our way so we can use them in our classrooms. And should you have time, consider a final step of discussing with the class which characters seem more or less legitimate to include. For example, in the immigration set, should the interests of aspiring immigrants be on par with those of current citizens? In the abortion set, should a representative for the unborn be included? And could a set be developed on environmental policy that included a card for a polar bear or a natural habitat? We leave that for you and your students to decide.

Download the Rawls Game Character Cards

Below are the character cards the authors used in their classes. Each set has six cards, one per student in a group of six. Download the Word file to edit the characters or add your own, or the PDF to print them as they are.

The taxation set includes 30 characters and is designed to be tackled by the entire class at once. Just divide them into 3 or 4 groups and divvy up the character cards with a mind towards giving each team a selection of wealthy, middle class, and impoverished characters. Then ask the groups to decide on a taxation policy (flat, progressive, etc.) separately in their smaller teams, and to decide on a set of public goods they would want their taxes to support. For example, national defense, health insurance/health care, childcare, housing and/or food for those who can’t afford it. This can be a great warm-up round, especially if you pause at the end to talk about the various taxation schemes and programs the different groups would support, as well as how the interests of the various characters would or wouldn’t be honored.

• Rawls Game Healthcare Policy Set
• Rawls Game Immigration Policy Set
• Rawls Game Firearms Policy Set
• Rawls Game Abortion Policy Set
• Rawls Game Taxation Policy Set

If you create a new character set, the authors would love to see it.