Weekly-Journal-2-Veil-of-Ignorance-minimum-300-words-political-science-homework-help
Weekly-Journal-2-Veil-of-Ignorance-minimum-300-words-political-science-homework-help
Dear all,
For this week’s journal reflection, I would like you to imagine that you lived behind a “veil of ignorance” such that you didn’t know your gender, your age, your race, your sexual orientation, your socioeconomic status, etc. In other words, you don’t anything about your status in society except the fact that you are human. A veil is an article of clothing, usually worn by women, that is intended to cover some part of the head or face. Behind this so-called “veil of ignorance,” I would like to know what rights you think are most important and why. Put differently, if you were rewriting our Bill of Rights from behind a veil of ignorance, what would you put into it and why? Please be specific about the rights and liberties that you would add, if any, to the Constitution and the rights and liberties that you would take out, if any, of the Constitution. Please also address why you would add and/or subtract these right and liberties.
The reason I am asking you to wrestle with this hypothetical is that we often defend the rights and liberties that benefit us and we have a hard time imagining what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes and be in need of other rights and liberties. Also, as Americans we tend to think that the Constitution is infallible and the Bill of Rights is exhaustive when neither is true. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and a signatory to the Constitution, wrote that “every constitution…every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” Nineteen years is an arbitrary number, but the point he was making is that we should periodically revisit the Constitution to make sure that it keeps up with changing mores.
To get your creative juices flowing about other rights and liberties that may be important and that don’t appear in our Constitution, you may want to check out the following documents:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Links to an external site.)(the United States helped write the UDHR, but it is not legally binding on the United States or any other State). If you would prefer not to read the UDHR,click here (Links to an external site.)
to watch a short, well-made video which covers it pretty well.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Links to an external site.)(the United States is a signatory to this international treaty and has ratified it so technically it is part of our domestic law)
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Links to an external site.) (The United States is a signatory to this international treaty but has not ratified it so it is not part of our domestic law)
Hope you find this exercise provocative. Keep in mind the minimum word count (300 words) and let me know if you have any questions.
