Rawls’s conception of justice does not directly address our treatment of the environment. As a theory of social justice, and not a comprehensive account of morality, it focuses primarily on the basic structure of society. His main goal is to develop principles to regulate the shared institutions of a democratic society in which individuals are understood to be free and equal, reasonable and rationalmoral persons. Rawls apparently assumed that nonhuman animals lack the two moral powers necessary for full participation in a scheme of social cooperation. (This is not controversial for the vast majority of species.) Therefore, he assumed that reciprocity of social justice was not owed to them. This is emphatically not to say, however, that they are beyond moral consideration. As he observes in A Theory of Justice, while animals are not owed the rights of persons under his principles of social justice,