John Rawls and Claims of Climate Justice: Tensions and Prospects

John Rawls has never addressed natural goods as “primary goods”, nor has he paid attention to environmental justice. Rather than speculating on the reasons for this omission and elaborating on a proposal for how Rawls‘s approach to justice could be expanded to integrate issues of environmental justice, this paper defends another claim. It argues that John Rawls’s theory of justice still provides a groundbreaking approach to environmental justice. The paper starts with challenges that this field of research presents to Rawls’s theory of justice. In order to illustrate these claims, the paper includes a short sketch of climate justice as an emerging field of environmental justice. The contribution then draws attention to several of Rawls’ very basic insights which are critical to the discussion of environmental justice. In particular, his insights regarding the political nature of fairness are still particularly important.