67 - The environment
from E
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
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,
it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to them, nor in our relations with the natural order. Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly imposes duties of compassion and humanity in their case. I shall not attempt to explain these considered beliefs. They are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extend the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way. A correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory of the natural order and our place in it. (TJ 448)
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 252 - 255Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014