Thickening Rawls’ veil of ignorance to include nonhumans founders on imagined irrationality.

Evidence

Others (such as van deVeer 1979; Wenz 1988) offer another, more radical, proposal for expanding a Rawlsian approach; one could ‘thicken’ the veil of ignorance Rawls asks us to imagine as we develop the original set of justice principles. Behind this veil, we should not only be blind to our future position in society, our abilities and talents, and our possible lot in life, but we should also consider that we might not even be human on the other side of the veil. Wissenburg (1993: 17) argues that this idea really does not work in theory, as he argues that we cannot imagine what it means to be irrational; even if we could, we could not use that irrationality to plan the rational set of rules Rawls asks us to. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 366

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘thickened veil of ignorance’ move in ecological-extended Rawlsianism and its critique.
• XREF: Directly usable as the distributive-only foil in the Eco-Justice course typology: nature-as-subject cannot enter through a human-distribution framework. — connects to: Food security movements oppose displacement from land into vulnerable cash economies — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 288