Rawls on the Status of Animals Within a Theory of Justice

The liberal theory associated with John Rawls provides a political conception of justice according to which only those beings who are capable of developing a sense of justice are entitled to be actual beneficiaries of justice. This implies that only an autonomous being capable of rational self-determination can make claims to justice within a public political culture. Non-human beings, such as animals, would be excluded from a theory of justice since they do not possess the ability to define, apply and act upon principles of justice. This paper analyzes the implications of this approach by concentrating on three main aspects. First, it deals with Rawls’s political conception of justice as presented in Political Liberalism in order to highlight the conditions Rawls considers necessary to develop such a concept. The main focus will be here on a conception of basic justice as an active process that needs to be constantly applied in terms of rights and obligations rather than being simply stated in terms of rights and benefits. Second, it investigates the role that our relations to animals and the rest of nature need to play in this context. Here I will mainly analyze one of Rawls’s reasons for considering animals outside the scope of justice, namely the view that principles of justice need to primarily be justified by the parts involved rather than simply stated in order to gain legitimacy. Third, following this line of argumentation, I will question one of Rawls’s implications, namely that only beings endowed with a sense of justice are entitled to receive justice within a public political culture. I will argue that even if a sense of justice can be exercised only by moral agents, it does not necessarily follow that justice is solely extended to them. Moral agents, such as human beings, can nevertheless include non-human beings in a theory of justice. However, this is possible not by stating that animals have natural rights equal to the ones of human beings, but rather by attributing human rights to animals. This encourages human beings to view animals and the rest of nature as a protected value and, hence, make judgments that increase their empathetic awareness towards them.