DELIMITING JUSTICE: ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, ECOSYSTEM?

Angie Pepper

doi:10.7202/1055125ar

Abstract

This paper attempts to bring some clarity to the debate among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists on the issue of who or what can count as a candidate recipient of justice. I begin by examining the concept of justice and argue that the character of duties and entitlements of justice sets constraints on the types of entities that can be recipients of justice. Specifically, I contend that in order to be a recipient of justice, one must be the bearer of enforceable moral claim rights. I then suggest that this has important implications for the dispute among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists. In brief, I show that sentientists cannot exclude nonsentient entities from the domain of justice merely by denying that they have “the right kind of interests,” and biocentrists and ecocentrists cannot move seamlessly from some feature of living things or ecosystems to entitlements of justice. I further argue that ultimately this disagreement on the bounds of justice bottoms out in a normative disagreement about which entities possess moral claim rights, and that the case for biotic or ecosystem rights has yet to be convincingly established.

Highlights

For many defenders of animal rights, all and only sentient beings are to be counted as the proper recipients of justice
Attempts to delimit the scope of justice by appeal to sentience are contested by some environmental ethicists, who argue that the sentience threshold is theoretically indefensible
Critics of sentientism have argued that appeal to sentience is morally arbitrary and relies upon an anthropocentric bias (Fulfer, 2013; Plumwood, 1999)

Summary

THE CONCEPT OF JUSTICE

I want to begin by noting that all parties to the dispute are interested in what I will call “political justice.” That is, defenders of justice for sentient animals, nonsentient life, and ecosystems are concerned with institutionally enforceable rightful entitlements. The duties of justice that correlate with claim rights are directed—that is, they are owed to someone or some others.7 This means that, when we violate our directed duties of justice, we do not merely act wrongly with regard to someone or some others, but we wrong those to whom the duty was directed. The satisfaction of our duties of justice depends on us acting in ways that respond directly to correlative claim rights—rights others have against us to perform or abstain from certain actions This structure of just entitlements and their correlative directed duties brings us to the third distinctive feature of justice, and that is that duties of justice are prima facie enforceable. Allowing the discourse of justice to monopolize the moral domain is implausible and limits what we can say about our moral lives in ways that are both practically and theoretically unattractive

THE ALLURE OF JUSTICE TALK

BIOCENTRISM AND ECOCENTRISM

CONCLUSION