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# Posted 9:44 PM by Anonymous

WHAT IF A VEIL OF IGNORANCE were tossed over the fury of the Middle East?

With Arielle I attended a talk here in Oxford tonight by Peter Hitchens, a columinst for the Mail on Sunday. He uttered many things of interest, including my new favorite phrase: “Proto-Marxist-Guevara infantilism.”

But his most striking idea reminded me of John Rawls. Rawls is the Harvard professor and twentieth-century political theorist who spoke of the veil of ignorance. It was his answer to the elusiveness of objectivity in constitution-making. Nations like France and America, born in the eighteenth-century heyday of enlightenment rationalism, held that all people could share a sense of the common good; a constitution was an effort to capture that on paper. After Marx and others, that view was impossible: if class determined interest, there could be no common good. Rawls stepped into this pluralistic milieu. How was one to think objectively about the ideal state when everyone was conceded to be subjective? Rawls’ answer was: if every citizen imagined himself behind a veil of ignorance, in a condition of not knowing to which class he would belong, where he would stand on the social ladder. He would then, Rawls said, choose the most just constitution, by resort to an objectivity which cannot, in practice, exist.

That digression into a seminar was conjured by something Hitchens said about objectivity in the Middle East. It is hard to come by. But consider this West Asian veil of ignorance: would you rather be an Arab in a Jewish state, or a Jew in an Arab state? It’s a good question – one, in my view, with a simple answer. And it is one way to shine moral clarity on a subject that too often inspires only base moral equivalence.

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