Part 6: The Dr. Steve Best Narratives:
Animal justice and multispecies relations
Whether one considers the “Bali Principles of Climate Justice” (2002), the Durban “La Via Campesina Declaration” (2012), the “Declaration on Climate Justice” (2013), the “Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival,” or “Science for the Peoples’ New Deal Campaign”; whether the manifestos come from youth, women, people of color, workers, ecosocialists, academics, or what have you, the emphases are invariably human-centered. They thereby exclude substantive mention of the Animal Holocaust, the human and ecological consequences of the animal-industrial complex, and the crucial role animal liberation and vegan groups could play in a just transition to ecological society.
The animal liberation movement is a social justice movement like any other, albeit one led by humans on behalf of other species. Animal injustice involves the wrongdoing of human violence, exploitation, and domination over animals’ lives. Animal justice is also an environmental justice issue, given that humans have disrupted, polluted, set fire to, or destroyed the habitats animals require to live and flourish. No different from humans, animals too need a “safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” as necessary for “the full enjoyment of all [animal] rights, for present and future generations” (United Nations, 2022). Because animal species too are gravely impacted by global warming and ecosystem collapse, they are deserving of climate justice as well.
For over two millennia, Western philosophy, religion, political theory, and legal systems have been predicated on the dualistic logics that erected impassible walls between humans and animals. In recent decades, however, scientists, philosophers, feminists, and others have dismantled the fallacious conceptual dichotomies that break the continuities of life with such devastating consequences. Recognizing minority traditions that espoused vegetarianism, species egalitarianism, and contempt for human arrogance, the basic premise that animals exist for human purposes was not consistently questioned by mainstream Western thought until the 1970s. Viewed as beings without reason, rights, or moral status, animals have been treated as such; they fall outside the system of justice—which defines fair treatment—because by definition humans cannot treat “non-rational” beings unjustly.
Modern notions of animal rights and animal justice have been based variously on appeals to sentience or preferences (Singer), personhood (Wise); subjects of a life (Regan); as well as dignity, agency, capabilities, and life projects (Nussbaum). Despite different philosophical outlooks, they all assign direct moral or intrinsic value to other animals (at times some more than others), stress the complexity of their lives, and emphasize that our similarities with other animals—like having preferences, interests in pleasure over pain and freedom over confinement—have far greater moral and legal significance than our differences.
If the 1970s and 1980s were the heyday of philosophical discussions of animal rights, the last two decades have seen a spate of new engagements with animal justice. Animal justice proponents reject humanism and speciesism; they decenter the place of humans to focus on the “more-than-human world” and urge recognition of our pressing obligations to other beings. For theorists like Nussbaum, grounding arguments for animal rights and justice in sentience is insufficient because, as cognitive ethologists have stressed, animals have far more complex needs, interests, and capacities to satisfy and exercise; like humans, they need not only to live, but to flourish in a good life. Consequently, humans act justly toward other animals when they respect and protect their lives, and injustices to animals demand redress.
In his essay “Climate Injustice in a More-Than-Human World,” Donoso (2023) argues that because humans have overextended their presence on earth in terms of numbers, resource consumption, habitat destruction, and impacts like climate change, their behaviors directly undermine the needs and interests of other species and constitute a fundamental injustice of one species toward countless others. Donoso’s focus is on distributive justice and the misappropriation of “the benefits that the Earth’s life-support systems and its physical resources provide to sentient animals. In other words, they are misappropriations of ecological space. These are wrongs against animals that should be condemned, prohibited, and redressed.” Donoso notes that all life forms are directly dependent upon Earth’s resources; they co-exist within a common environment and have equal entitlement to it. Ecological resources and spaces must be shared and taking more than one’s share at the expense of others “is not only immoral, but unjust. It is immoral because it wrongs both human and nonhuman animals by imposing direct harm on them without justification or redress. It is unjust because it disturbs the appropriate allocation of ecological space on the planet, as required by the basic right to ecological space to which all sentient animals are equally entitled.” And “[s]ince no one has made a special or unique contribution to the creation of the constituent parts of ecological space,” Donoso argues, “nobody has a special entitlement over these environmental goods in virtue of their contribution to their creation. In other words, all sentient animals have a symmetrical claim over the ecological space necessary for their good life (relative to the specific needs and functions of each of them). And, on pain of violating the basic right to ecological space, stringent negative duties of justice should limit the extent and intensity of human use of ecological space.”
The related notion of multispecies justice places greater emphasis on the diverse ways of knowing, being, acting, and communicating in animal communities. In a radical leap beyond the humanist limitations of climate activists’ concepts of recognition justice, proponents of multispecies justice emphasize the need to recognize animals’ “own radically diverse life projects, capacities, phenomenologies, ways of being, functionings, forms of integrity, and relationalities” (Celermajer et al., 2021). Like earth system scientists, many multispecies proponents define the community of life and justice in the broadest terms: from microbiomes to oceans to forests, “the relations among and across them are all fit subjects of justice. Consequently, multispecies injustice comprises all the human interruptions of the functioning of this broad array of relations.”
Multispecies justice theorists inscribe human beings in the larger natural, ecological, and social context to which they belong, resulting in far more sophisticated models of human experience than liberal-humanist models. Naturally, these models require new legal and political forms “sufficiently capacious to encompass … the multiplicity of ways of being [and] negotiating justice in ways that honor all and different points of view” (Chao and Celermajer, 2023). The breakthroughs of cognitive ethology and multispecies theory are important advances toward this task.
Selected References
Bali Principles of Climate Justice” (2002)(https://ejnet.org/files/ej/bali.pdf)
Durban “La Via Campesina Declaration” (2012)(https://viacampesina.org/en/2011/01/la-via-campesina-declaration-in-cancun/)
“Declaration on Climate Justice” (2013)(https://www.mrfcj.org/media/pdf/Declaration-on-Climate-Justice.pdf)
“Peoples’ Summit on Climate, Rights and Human Survival” (https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Universal-Peoples-Summit-Declaration-CC-Advocacy-2019-ENG.pdf)
Science for the People (https://scienceforthepeople.org/mission/)
Donoso, Alfonso (2023) “Climate injustice in a more-than-human world”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-023-09914-w
Chao and Celermajer (2023) “Introduction: multispecies justice” (https://read.dukeupress.edu/cultural-politics/article/19/1/1/352091/IntroductionMultispecies-Justice?guestAccessKey=)
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