Une démocratie libérale peut-elle faire face au changement climatique ? Penser la question écologique dans un cadre rawlsien

John Rawls is widely considered as the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. The question of how to address ecological problems however represents a blind spot in his theory of justice. How can the theory of justice as fairness be revised so that it can deal with the global and intergenerational environmental issues of the 21st century? To reply to this question, we propose to extend the non-normative hypotheses available to the parties in the original position to include non-controversial knowledge from environmental sciences. This proposal leads us to draw the ecological implications of the crucial notion of “circumstances of justice” and to broaden what is to count as a neutral justification. Before developing this extension of the Rawlsian framework, we begin by clarifying how we propose to read Rawls’s work and explain how his interpretation of the liberal requirement of neutrality led him to consider that the ecological question was, at least in part, outside the scope of his theory of justice.