 Hypothetical consensus has been developed as a criterion in contract theory in order to deal with inter-individual problems. We are invited to consider a hypothetical initial situation in which the social order of a future society has not yet been decided. When its future citizens meet to choose a social order, each of them is ignorant of her or his position in any of the social arrangements which they can choose among. According to John Rawls’s theory of justice, they will then all opt for a maximin solution, i.e. a social order in which the worst position that anyone can have in that society is as good as possible. In arguing for that solution, Rawls relied heavily on the assumption that none of the participants knows anything at all about the probability that she will end up in one or other of the positions in a future social order (Rawls 1957; 1971; 1974). John Harsanyi, who discussed this problem prior to Rawls, assumed that the probability of finding oneself in a particular social position is equal to the share of the population that will have the position in question, and that this is also known by all participants. Hence, if a fifth of the population in a certain type of society will be migrant workers, then each participant in Harsanyi’s initial situation will assume that she has a twenty per cent probability of becoming a migrant worker, whereas none of the participants in Rawls’s initial situation will have a clue what that probability can be. In Harsanyi’s initial situation, the participants will choose the social order with the highest expected utility (probability-weighted utility), thus taking all potential future positions into account, rather than only the least favourable one (Harsanyi 1953; 1955; 1975).