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I don't see anything wrong with looking for moral generalizations or basic rules. It seems to me that the Original Position has some great virtues; and yet, I also think that it raises some difficult questions.

The main virtue is that it eliminates distortions to our ethical views that derive from self-interest and other factors -- racial prejudice or male chauvinism, for example -- that we think are irrelevant. The idea is that since we don't know whether we will be a man or a woman, we cannot be biased by that knowledge. Here Rawls stands in a long tradition of moralists who use hypothetical devices to compensate for human deficiencies. Some moralists have talked about an impartial spectator. As in the case of Rawls, the impartial spectator or the all knowing spectator is defined in such a way as to make up for a limitation or weakness of real human beings. The spectator is completely impartial and all knowing; which, of course, we are not. Rawls, interestingly enough, does just the opposite. He attempts to compensate for human biases by assuming that the parties in his Original Position know very little.

But there are also problems -- or at least difficult questions.

• How can we know what the parties would agree to in the Original Position? What if our political leanings influence our conclusions on this point? Then we have gotten nowhere. All the interesting apparatus simply provides a framework for our preferences.
   
• Why should we care what the parties in the Original Position would agree to? After all, there is no actual agreement and nothing to bind us in the way that a real agreement would. It's entirely hypothetical. We need a reason to pay attention to what we think would happen in the Rawlsean Original Position.