The Rawlesian veil of ignorance is a standard in ethical philosophy, unlike the trolley problem, which is only ever found among people who never took humanities.

In a nutshell:

Imagine you will be reincarnated. You will be reborn as *anyone*, of any class, race, religion, gender, etc.

What kind of society would you create if you knew you'd be reincarnated?

What Rawles wanted to focus on, is that everyone who has an idea of how society should work, oddly always puts themselves or people like them at the top, in charge.

Rawles' thought experiment asks, simply, that you create a social structure without having any idea of where you will be within it.

Unlike the trolley problem, where you are to imagine you are the one holding the lever, the veil of ignorance asks you to create a scenario where you could be anyone including the people tied to the tracks.

The trolley problem imagines that you are the only one with agency, and that somehow people just have to be tied to train tracks.

Rawls' veil of ignorance asks: suppose you could be one of the people tied to the tracks instead. How would you avoid getting in that situation?

It's a completely opposite way of looking at things, and has a completely different effect on what kinds of structures are made appealing to consider.

The trolley problem, as you can see from the people who like to use it, appeals to people who very clearly do not consider society from other people's perspective.

The veil of ignorance *forces* you to look from other perspectives, to notice cracks and holes not visible from the top of the food chain.

The veil of ignorance is used in real philosophy, unlike the trolley problem, because it allows people to reason about systems.

It's not you, given agency through a lever and asked to make a decision.

It's the whole situation of some booming voice, a person with a lever, and helpless hostages, any one of which a person could find themselves in.