The abstraction of humanity is also prevalent in philosophy. One startling modern example is Rawls’s justice as fairness, whose veil of ignorance sought to abstract the very fabric of our human experiences, whether these were cultural, social, gender, and so on. Rawls actually admits that this device is a mechanism designed purely to elicit the principles of justice that the author has already selected: “This original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice”. For a further discussion on Rawls and Hegel, see Browning. Abstract rationality is very far from the totality of human experience and tellingly it neglects exactly the principles that Hegel outlines: it relies on a distinction between subject and object that overlooks the complex reality of intersubjectivity and in so doing it fails to recognize our full human selves.