Post on 16-May-2023
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PLANETARY ETHICS AND ECOLOGICAL FLOURISHING
By Jorge M. Valadez
The primary objective of planetary ethics is to articulate the justice obligations we have
to all of the beings with moral status who are members of the earth community, understood in
intergenerational terms. In this paper I provide a schematic description of our justice obligations
in the four fundamental domains of justice, namely, justice obligations to the members of our
own political community, to individuals in other political communities, to future generations,
and to nonhuman animals and plants. There are important advantages to adopting the holistic
perspective of planetary ethics that recognizes multiple domains of justice. First, by taking into
account our justice obligations to all beings with moral status, rather than just our obligations to
our compatriots, we attain a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the moral duties
appropriate for an emerging global civilization. Given the interconnectedness of the
contemporary world and the global scope of our collective problems, it is imperative to expand
the range of our justice obligations beyond the boundaries of our own national community to
include our obligations to all beings who merit moral concern.
Second, it is sometimes not possible to adequately articulate the nature of our justice
obligations in one normative domain without understanding our moral duties in the other
domains. For example, given the transnational effects of consumption and extraction patterns,
without identifying the global obligations we have to other political communities we will not
know the extent to which these obligations might constrain the ways we should use state
territorial resources. Likewise, without understanding the rights of wilderness animals to use the
resources in their habitats to independently flourish in conjunction with other species, a political
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community will not know the extent to which its members may legitimately access the natural
resources in these habitats.
Third, the theory of planetary ethics I defend is theoretically unified in that it postulates
the existence of a fundamental overarching principle of justice that explicates how our justice
obligations can differ in relation to different beings with moral status in the justice domains.
Justice obligations in each domain of justice are understood in terms of safeguarding the capacity
of beings with moral status for ecological flourishing within sustainable natural and
sociopolitical environments. The specific obligations involved in safeguarding the capacity for
sustainable sociocultural and natural flourishing are determined by the normatively relevant
species-specific features of these beings and the sociopolitical and ecological relationships we
have towards them within and across these environments. Planetary ethics can thus articulate the
different justice obligations we have to various beings with moral status while providing a
normative rationale for these differences. By doing this, planetary ethics provides a theoretically
unified account of all of our justice obligations to beings with differential moral status. The
failure to provide a conceptually coherent account of our justice obligations to all beings with
moral status is one of the most serious flaws in existing theories of justice.
Fourth, it is of great importance to articulate a planetary ethic because it would support
the survival and flourishing of human and nonhuman species. It is a central tenet of planetary
ethics that justice promotes the survival and flourishing of life forms while injustice undermines
the capacity of human and nonhuman species to attain these objectives. The plausibility of this
claim should become increasingly clear as I discuss the justice obligations in the different
domains of justice and how they promote sustainable flourishing. Finally, planetary ethics has
great transformative potential because it can function as a secular global moral vision that
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provides the resources of traditional religion-based morality. This advantage of planetary ethics
means that it has the capacity to impact human societies in ways that traditional philosophical
ethical theories usually do not. The power of religion-based moralities is partly based on their
capacity to provide people with cosmic narratives that offer a profound sense of meaning,
purpose, and value. Unlike other secular moral perspectives, planetary ethics draws from the
diverse and deep resources of ethical theory, evolutionary biology, complexity theory, quantum
mechanics, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, astrophysics, and other physical and behavioral
sciences to provide a nonreligious alternative understanding of our cosmic origins, morality,
evolutionary development, and even our sense of place and purpose in the universe. By drawing
on these areas of knowledge, planetary ethics proposes a new understanding of moral
consciousness and the human person, one that shows that morality is an evolutionary
development of a creative self-organizing universe which has given rise to numerous forms of
life embodying their own intrinsic goods and forms of value. Planetary ethics signals a turning
point in which ethical theory, aided by the natural and social sciences, can finally challenge
religion-based moralities with a powerful existentially appealing cosmic narrative of its own.
Moreover, as a rational and science-based holistic moral vision, planetary ethics avoids the
problems of epistemic indeterminacy and divisiveness that plague religion-based moralities.
As mentioned earlier, planetary ethics encompasses justice obligations in four normative
domains involving our compatriots, the members of other political communities, beings in the
natural world, and future generations. Four categories of beings who possess differential moral
status are included in these domains: human animals, animals who are subjects-of-a-life, sentient
animals who are not subjects-of-a-life, and nonsentient animals and plants. The domains of
justice refer to the broad normative areas in which distinctive justice obligations arise, while the
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categories of beings with moral status refer to the classes of entities which populate these
domains. As we shall see below, it is very important to distinguish between levels of moral
status, otherwise we will be unable to resolve the partiality problem, i.e., the dilemma that in the
actual world inevitably arises when the interests of beings with moral status conflict.
I understand our obligations to all of the beings with moral status in the four domains in
terms of a single overarching justice principle. According to this principle, we have a moral
obligation to safeguard the capacity for ecological flourishing of beings with moral status within
sustainable natural and sociopolitical environments. Ecological flourishing is understood as the
sustainable development and free exercise of the species-specific capacities of beings with moral
status. Their survival and flourishing depends on their ongoing capacity to adapt to and shape
these environments in a way that promotes their continued flourishing. Note that my overarching
justice principle specifies that we have an obligation to safeguard the capacity of beings with
moral status to flourish ecologically, it does not state that we have to ensure that they do in fact
flourish in this way, for this would be too strong of a moral commitment. There are too many
factors involved in their flourishing that are beyond our control and that we are not responsible
for. We are not responsible, at least in the case of humans, for the individual decisions they make
that affect their flourishing or, in the case of humans, animals, and plants, in control of all of the
contingent circumstances that may limit their flourishing.
On the other hand, it seems too weak to hold that our obligations are limited to not
interfering with their flourishing, for we would then not be obligated to help people in dire need
or facilitate access to basic needs like food and water. The position I take here, which is between
these extremes, is that we have a moral obligation to safeguard the capacity for ecological
flourishing of human beings and other living beings in sustainable natural and sociopolitical
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environments. In determining what is involved in “safeguarding” the capacity for ecological
flourishing, we should look, on the one hand, at the morally relevant features they possess, such
as their capacity to feel pain or their capacity for autonomous action and, on the other, at the
ecological and institutional relations that bind us to them, such as living in a common territory
with animals or shared membership in a self-governing political community. As we shall see,
incorporating these components into our normative analysis will enable us to identify the
multiple and differentiated moral obligations we have to the members of the planetary
community.
In what follows I begin by discussing the concept of moral status and identifying the
different categories of beings to which this concept applies. I then examine the importance of
sociopolitical and natural environments for identifying our justice obligations to the categories of
beings with moral status in the domains of justice. I continue by proving a brief description and
defense of our justice obligations in the four domains of justice. I conclude by discussing some
of the scientific developments that situate planetary ethics within a metaphysical and theological
context that has important implications for the development of a transcultural spiritual
perspective for an emerging global civilization. Given the great complexity of my project, in this
paper my account of these topics is necessarily programmatic and brief and a fuller account will
be provided in an upcoming monograph.
The Moral Status of Human and Nonhuman Beings
A distinctive objective of planetary ethics is that it aspires to provide a systematic and
theoretically cohesive account of our justice obligations to all of the inhabitants of the earth
community. A natural way to proceed is to identify all of the entities that have moral status and
to provide the reasons why they merit such status. This will lay the basis for understanding the
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moral obligations we have towards them. Possessing moral status endows an entity with moral
considerability, that is, with the property of deserving some degree of respect and consideration
for its welfare by beings capable of expressing such concern. In the view I defend here, what
grounds moral status are the normatively relevant species-specific properties of a category of
beings.
Recognizing that an entity has moral status, however, is not enough to determine the
particular obligations that we have towards it. For instance, we may recognize that all human
beings have moral status, but this would be insufficient for determining the specific obligations
we have towards our compatriots that are different than those we have to non-compatriots. Some
of our obligations to our compatriots are arguably different than to non-compatriots in the
political realm, for example, because we are members of the same self-governing political body
that directly and pervasively structures our lives in distinctive social, economic, cultural, and
political ways. Similarly, even though we will grant moral status to nonhuman animals, this does
not tell us how to identify the different moral obligations we have to our pets, circus animals,
migrating birds, or wilderness animals. To determine the specific obligations we have to beings
with moral status we must take into account not only their normatively relevant species-specific
properties, but also the specific and general associative relationships we have to them. That is,
we need to take into account the ecological and sociopolitical relationships that bind us to them
in the environments in which we are mutually situated. I discuss the relevance of sociopolitical
and natural environments for ecological flourishing and for our justice obligations in the next
section, for now I start by considering the normatively relevant general and species-specific
properties of living beings which ground their moral status.
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Planetary ethics recognizes four categories of beings with moral status: human animals,
nonhuman animals who are subjects-of-a-life, nonhuman animals who are sentient but not
subjects-of-a-life, and nonhuman nonsentient animals and plants. Beings have moral status when
moral agents have a responsibility to take their interests into account when considering actions
that affect their well-being. The responsibility that moral agents have to treat such beings with
moral concern is based on their intrinsic value. Here I understand intrinsic value as inhering in
living beings and as grounded in the autonomous goodness and desirability of the state of
flourishing sought or achieved by those living beings. Regarding the moral status of humans, I
maintain that we can directly intuit that those states in which we fail to flourish because of the
absence of basic needs, for example, are intrinsically less good and desirable than those in which
our flourishing is achieved. We recognize as intrinsically good and desirable those circumstances
in which we have the physical and psychosocial goods necessary for our flourishing. In other
words, humans can intuitively grasp the state of their own flourishing as an intrinsic good.
Moreover, we can also apprehend—at first in our own case and later through generalization to
similarly constituted and situated beings—that there is inherent value in those states in which
living beings like ourselves flourish. Since other human beings have needs and vulnerabilities
similar to our own, we can comprehend the generalized notion that human flourishing, other
things being equal, is itself good and desirable.
In addition to the intrinsic goodness and desirability of human flourishing, another reason
why humans possess moral status is that they exercise moral agency. Human animals are the
species that most clearly exemplifies the characteristics associated with moral agency, such as
self-imposed moral prohibitions, highly complex norm structured behavior, moral deliberation,
rationality, intentional action, affective complexity, self-awareness, and cognizance of alternative
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courses of action. As far as we can tell, human animals are the species that most clearly
instantiate moral consciousness and deliberation and could therefore be considered as the
paradigmatic moral agents. As the exemplars of moral agency, it is reasonable to grant human
animals moral status for they are the creatures that most clearly instantiate the moral concern that
makes moral status meaningful, i.e., the meaningfulness of the notion of moral status depends on
the existence or possible existence of moral agents capable of expressing the moral concern that
is associated with such status. Thus, humans have inherent moral status and worth both because
human flourishing is intrinsically good and because they clearly exemplify moral agency. It is
important to note that in the category of human beings I include the members of future
generations. As I will show in the section where I discuss justice obligations in the domain of
future generations, these beings should also be granted moral status.
What follows from the realization that the flourishing of human beings is intrinsically
good and desirable? Since part of the meaning of a state of affairs being intrinsically good is that,
other things being equal, it is desirable that it come into existence, recognizing the intrinsic value
of a human being’s flourishing entails that it is desirable that his or her flourishing come into
being. In addition, since the failure of a human being to flourish involves suffering, pain,
disappointment, frustration, or other undesirable consequences, it is incumbent on human beings
to take other people into account when undertaking actions that affect their flourishing. But these
considerations do not tell us much about what our particular moral obligations are in bringing
about human flourishing. As we shall see below, to determine the specific obligations we have to
human animals and other beings with moral status, we need to examine the normative
relationships we have towards them as well as their level of moral status.
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Even though human persons are the paradigmatic bearers of moral status, the members of
certain other animal species exhibit characteristics on the basis of which they should also be
granted moral status. Thomas Regan has proposed that beings who are “subjects-of-a-life”
should also be regarded as possessing intrinsic value.1 Regan believes that such beings are
singular individuals with a life of their own who are sentient, have a sense of who they are, can
suffer and experience pain, have goals and expectations can be realized or thwarted, and can
have good or bad lives.2 Like humans, they are conscious, feeling beings and what happens in
their life matters to them. Thus, their wellbeing depends on complex species-specific goods
(besides such simpler goods as finding food and avoiding predators) and they should be taken
into account when moral agents consider actions that affect them. There is evidence that certain
animals exhibit features that warrant considering them as subjects-of-a-life. For instance,
bonobos and magpies show self-awareness while wolves, capuchin monkeys, elephants, and
even rats demonstrate ostensibly intentional, norm structured behavior.3 Crows and chimpanzees
manifest purposeful, rational behavior.4 Given their cognitive and affective complexity, it would
not be inaccurate to characterize these animals as being the subjects-of-a-life. Even though
animals who are subjects-of-a-life may not consciously apprehend the intrinsic goodness and
desirability that their own flourishing has for them, we as humans are able to cognize that they
consciously seek their own flourishing and that they have species-specific goods of their own
towards which they strive.
But what about simpler animals? Sentience, understood as the capacity to experience
feelings of pain or pleasure, has been proposed as a less stringent but justifiable standard for
extending moral status to less complex animals.5 Some animals—even though they may not have
self-conscious preferences, a sense of a future, or other features of beings who are subjects-of-a-
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life—are nevertheless sentient and can suffer. In favor of granting moral status to sentient
animals, it could be pointed out that we can reasonably maintain that feeling pain is objectively
bad and should therefore the subject of moral concern. If we recognize that our own pain is
inherently undesirable or bad, consistency demands that we acknowledge that the pain of other
beings is also undesirable or bad. If experiencing pain is inherently hurtful and undesirable then
we have reason to be morally concerned, all other things being equal, to avoid inflicting pain to
sentient beings, whether they are persons or animals. In short, among other goods such as finding
food and reproducing, sentient animals seek the good of living a life avoiding unnecessary pain.
Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, they have goods of their own which are central
to their flourishing and towards which they strive.
Regarding the question of how we know that nonhuman animals are sentient, the
evidence for sentience among at least some nonhuman animals is compelling.6 There are several
kinds of evidence that we can obtain to determine whether an organism is sentient, such as the
structural and functional similarity of its nervous system to our own, its behavior when exposed
to harmful stimuli, the presence of neurochemicals that have been shown in humans to be related
to feelings of pain and pleasure, and the existence of perceptual sensory organs which are usually
correlated with the capacity for sentience. When we look at the available evidence for animal
sentience the case for affirming its existence is strong. The evidence is particularly compelling
where complex vertebrates such as mammals and birds are concerned. The behavioral and
physiological similarities between these vertebrates and humans are sufficiently strong to justify
the claim that they are sentient and at least experience pleasure and pain. The evidence for
sentience in fish, reptiles, and amphibians is less compelling but their neurophysiology and
behavior are similar enough to that of humans that on balance it is likely that they also possess
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sentience. Complex invertebrates such as cephalopods and arthropods are very different from
humans in their behavior and neurophysiology, but their nervous systems and sense organs
provide moderate support for the hypothesis that they can experience pain. However, less
complex invertebrates, such as shrimp and oysters, are less likely to be sentient since their
nervous systems are not highly developed and their behavioral responses appear to be mostly
instinctive. Unicellular animals, such as amoebas, are likely to be non-sentient, given their lack
of a nervous system. In short, based on available evidence it is reasonable to maintain that at
least some nonhuman animals are sentient.
Even though many thinkers might consider sentience as the minimal standard for granting
moral status to animals, I maintain that even those living beings that are not sentient have moral
standing because they are beings that exemplify goal-oriented characteristics such as seeking
nourishment from their environment, developing and exercising their biological functions,
striving to reproduce, and maintaining their functional integrity. As Paul Taylor has argued, even
the simplest animals are teleological systems of self-organized activity that are constantly trying
to find nourishment, maintain their structural integrity, and exercise their species specific
capacities.7 As such, they have independent goods of their own towards which they strive. Their
goals can be thwarted and they can be harmed by our actions. We need not assume that they are
sentient to recognize that being harmed or killed go against their natural tendencies to live and
develop and exercise their species-specific capacities. Whether sentient or nonsentient, all
animals embody their own independently existing goods that moral agents should take into
account.
Plants exemplify many of the goal-oriented features attributed to simple nonsentient
animals. Plants exhibit adaptively variable behavior, that is, they can move and respond to their
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environment in ways that promote their survival and flourishing, such as turning towards the
sunlight, absorbing nutrients from the soil, producing toxins to ward off predators and invaders,
processing complex information about their environment, and responding in variable ways in
adapting to their environment.8 Plants use their roots to seek and identify humidity and nutrients
in the soil, thus showing that they can process and use information about their environment to
further their survival and growth.9 Plants can register information about other neighboring plants
and use this information to regulate their phenotypic plasticity.10 Recent research indicates that
plants even use quantum processes to optimize the absorption of photons from sunlight.11 In
short, far from being passive organisms that respond mechanically to their environment, plants
actively engage with their environment and with other plants to promote their survival, growth,
and reproduction. Even though they do not have a centralized neurological center, they exhibit
embodied cognition and act like autonomous agents actively seeking their own independent
goods. Because plants are living beings autonomously seeking their own goods, they should be
granted moral status.
On the basis of the criteria I have used to grant moral status to a wide range of living
beings, we can develop a classificatory scheme for identifying levels or degrees of moral status
for these beings. In this scheme, we recognize four levels of moral status based on the number
and strength of normatively relevant similarities between the paradigmatic case of morally,
cognitively, and affectively complex human moral agents and the beings in each descending
category of moral status.12 The animals with the strongest level of moral status share the most,
and the most strongly similar, normatively relevant features with human moral agents, while
those with the lowest level of moral status share the fewest, and most weakly similar,
normatively relevant features with them. Thus, animals who are subjects-of-a- life share a
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significant number of normatively relevant characteristics with humans, sentient animals who are
not subjects-of-a-life share with humans fewer normatively relevant capacities, and simple
animals and plants that are not sentient but are self-organized teleological life-forms share the
fewest normatively relevant features with people. More particularly, humans would constitute
the first category of beings with moral status; most if not all primates, mammals, and birds would
constitute the second; amphibians, fish, and other vertebrates the third; and sponges, fleas, clams,
trees and cacti the fourth.
This method of attributing differential moral status to different categories of beings
conforms to our moral intuitions that unnecessarily harming or killing a human, a dog, or a
chimpanzee, for example, is more morally reprehensible than unnecessarily harming or killing a
goldfish, a toad, a shrimp, or a termite. By why is harming or killing the former worse than
harming or killing the latter if not because of the greater moral, cognitive, and affective
complexity of humans, dogs, and chimpanzees? Examples like these illustrate that even if we
believe that all animals have moral status we are likely to distinguish between the moral status of
different kinds of animals and that our distinctions reflect the animal’s cognitive and affective
complexity and/or its capacity for moral agency.
It is extremely important for any normative theory that grants moral status to a wide
range of beings to deal in a morally principled way with the dilemma known as the partiality
problem. The partiality problem arises when the interests of beings with moral status come into
conflict (as they inevitably do) and we have to decide which of these interests to prioritize.
Oftentimes, animal rights and environmental ethicists who grant moral status to a broad range of
beings try to sidestep or avoid this problem altogether.13 But avoiding the partiality problem will
not make it go away and moral theories that refuse to deal with this important problem are
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incapable of resolving dilemmas involving conflicts of interest between beings with moral status
in a theoretically coherent way. Another advantage of distinguishing between degrees of moral
status is that it accounts for the distinctions common sense morality makes between the moral
status of a dog or a dolphin, for example, and that of a flea or a shrimp. Even those who are
sympathetic to the welfare of all animals are likely to hold that we should prioritize the interests
of dogs and dolphins, respectively, over fleas and sardines when, for instance, we need to rid a
dog of disease carrying fleas or we need to feed sardines to a hungry dolphin.
Justice Obligations and Sociopolitical and Natural Environments
Thus far I have argued that we should expand the scope of moral consideration to all
inhabitants of the earth community. But, as already noted, establishing that living beings in a
certain category have moral status is not enough to identify the justice obligations we have
towards those beings. To identify those obligations we must first recognize that living beings do
not exist in isolation, but are part of natural and sociopolitical environments in which they are
connected to other living beings and in which their flourishing occurs. Despite the vastly diverse
ways in which entities with moral status flourish, one fundamental commonality they share is
that their flourishing invariably occurs within, and is structured by, their natural environment
and, particularly in the case of humans and some complex nonhuman animals, their
sociopolitical environment as well. Moreover, since these environments are situated within or
affected by other environments, the relationships between environments are also important.
These insights suggest that we need to examine the normatively relevant relationships within and
across natural and sociopolitical environments in order to understand our justice obligations to
beings with moral status in the four domains of justice. In this section I discuss the relevance of
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flourishing within sociopolitical and natural environments for identifying our justice obligations
to the beings with moral status that I have identified.
Recall that according to the fundamental principle of planetary ethics we have an
obligation to safeguard the capacity for ecological flourishing of beings with moral status within
sustainable natural and sociopolitical environments. Ecological flourishing is understood here as
encompassing biophysical as well as, in the case of humans and some nonhuman animals, social
flourishing. More precisely, ecological flourishing essentially involves the development and free
exercise of a living being’s species-specific capacities within sustainable natural and
sociopolitical environments. Planetary ethics is a holistic moral perspective that articulates
justice obligations by focusing on the normatively relevant characteristics of individuals and the
associative relationships between them, particularly as these relationships are shaped by the
institutional and natural environments in which they are situated. Since ecological flourishing
always occurs within a natural environment and, for some beings within a sociopolitical
environment as well, planetary ethics focuses from the outset on the fact that individuals are
situated within specific natural and social environments and that justice obligations arise within
and across these particular environments.
Moreover, ecological flourishing highlights the facts that sociopolitical and natural
environments are often embedded within broader environments and that they can encompass
smaller environments within them. In relation to one another, environments can be either
institutionally and/or physically (relatively) open or closed. Membership in a national
sociopolitical environment, for example, is restricted by regulations concerning admission,
democratic participation, fiscal responsibilities, and short- and long-term residence in their
territories. Concerning economic trade, however, most states at this time are relatively open since
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capital, goods, services, and information—but notably not labor—move relatively freely across
national boundaries. But while state territorial regions are generally administratively regulated,
they are in many cases ecologically open in the sense that environmental spill-over effects occur
without regard to administratively imposed territorial boundaries. As we shall see when we
discuss obligations in the international domain, the ecological openness of natural and
sociopolitical environments creates distinctive justice obligations at the international level while
the relative institutional closeness of these sociopolitical environments (primarily states),
differentiates the kind of obligations we have to compatriots and non-compatriots.
Because planetary ethics emphasizes the importance of natural environment for
ecological flourishing, it also reinforces the importance of environmental sustainability. Among
other considerations, a theory of justice that takes sustainability into account considers how
levels of production and consumption affect the carrying capacity of a natural environment. It
considers how present levels of resource use and environmental degradation affect the
coevolutionary capacity of human and wild animal communities to obtain life-sustaining
bioresources from the ecosystems in which they are embedded. Since continued flourishing for
beings with moral status is hardly possible without a sustainable natural environment capable of
maintaining its regenerative capacity and its ability to support biodiversity, sustainability is a
goal of central importance for planetary ethics. In particular, we want to support the conditions
under which the economic and cultural activities of human societies can be integrated into the
natural ecologies in which these societies are physically embedded, so as to preserve the
fecundity of the natural world of nonhuman animals and plants while meeting human needs. This
process would also involve addressing environmental injustices which not only undermine
human flourishing but lead to ecological degradation and unjust treatment of nonhuman animals.
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In brief, planetary ethics does not treat sustainability as an afterthought or as addition to justice
considerations, but from the outset grants it central importance.
But sociopolitical and natural environments are not only located in a spatial setting, they
are also situated in a temporal continuum. The present environments we inhabit are causally
connected to the physical and sociopolitical environments in which future generations will live.
The institutional environments we create and the way we treat our overarching natural
environment, namely the biosphere, will affect in fundamental ways the well-being of future
generations. Their capacity for flourishing can be either greatly hindered or enhanced by our
ecological practices and sociopolitical institutions. I maintain that it is appropriate to think of
justice to future generations in terms of protecting their capacity for natural and sociopolitical
flourishing. Moreover, other justice issues arise from the fact that not only physical but
sociopolitical environments are embedded in a temporal continuum. Historical processes
involving, for example, colonial domination, resource extraction, and ecological degradation, can
generate compensatory justice obligations between political communities. One of the
fundamental flaws of most theories of justice is that they neglect the actual historical processes
of state formation and development, which often involved territorial displacement or forced
incorporation of pre-existing political communities. By focusing on the control of territorial
spaces and the historical trajectories of actual state formation, my approach sheds light on
important normative issues that are often overlooked in conventional theories of justice. For
instance, to the extent that historical exploitative colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial practices
hinder the present capacity of political communities to adapt successfully in the global economic
environment, they generate compensatory justice obligations.14 Such obligations, while part of
our obligations to the members of other political communities, are not the same as those
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generated by our universal obligations to all human beings, but as justice obligations between
specific historically situated corporate entities, primarily states.
From a justice perspective, the most important sociopolitical environments are political
communities, which provide the institutional frameworks in which individuals attain specific
forms of legal personhood, participate in self-governance, acquire property, and in general
exercise their rights. Since participating in these institutional structures includes engaging in the
corresponding relationships which membership in these structures entails, the conception of
flourishing within one’s sociopolitical environment recognizes the special obligations that arise
from membership in these institutional frameworks. It is a significant advantage of the notion of
ecological flourishing, i.e., flourishing within one’s sociopolitical environment, that it recognizes
the great significance of institutional structures in particular political communities. By rejecting
normative individualism, i.e., the view that our justice obligations to one another can be
understood in isolation from institutional contexts or environments, a planetary ethic based on
the notion of flourishing within one’s social and natural environment offers a more adequate
theoretical alternative. By including institutional justice obligations within its normative scope,
planetary ethics is more comprehensive than theories based on normative individualism.
Conceiving of justice obligations in terms of ecological flourishing within sociopolitical
and natural environments also provides a deeper understanding of reflexive injustice. Unlike
more straightforward forms of injustice in which individuals are directly harmed by, for instance,
being deprived of protection from physical abuse, in reflexive injustice they are compelled to
live in self-imposed oppressive sociopolitical and natural environments which they adopt
attitudes and practices in response to exogenous decisions beyond their control. Reflexive
injustice involves the structural transformation of one’s sociopolitical and natural environment
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under conditions of domination. The conception of reflexivity involved here derives from the
observation that living beings do not adapt to static sociopolitical and natural environments, but
that they transform, even as they are affected by, their environments in the process of striving to
flourish. Flourishing as a normative ideal is attained when the members of communities have the
wherewithal to develop, sustain, and adapt to environments in which they can flourish
individually and collectively. In determining what is necessary to avoid reflexive injustice, we
need to take into account both the internal and exogenous factors affecting the sociopolitical and
natural environments in which individuals are situated. Participation in territorially based
political communities (states) is the primary context through which, at least at present, human
beings achieve individual and collective flourishing. But in an increasingly globalized
sociopolitical environment the transnational economic and political factors affecting states are
also of crucial importance. Thus, as we shall see in what follows, to understand ecological
flourishing in an inclusive sense we need to examine the conditions which support domestic
justice as well as those that give rise to global justice and how the demands of justice in these
two domains are interconnected.
Justice Obligations to Compatriots
I begin my discussion of the justice obligations in the four domains of justice by
examining our domestic justice obligations. Justice obligations in the domain of our national
political community can be divided into four categories of rights, namely, rights protecting
equality of political standing, decisional autonomy, basic social welfare, and group-specific
rights for the members of oppressed or vulnerable groups. Our strongest justice obligations are to
our compatriots given that we are engaged with them in the process of self-governance within a
shared political community. The process of self-governance generates distinctive mutual
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obligations among compatriots that we do not have to the members of other political
communities, such as the obligation to insure that all members of the polity have an equal
political voice in the formulation of collectively binding decisions. Similarly, we have a special
obligation to ensure that all the members of our political community do not suffer from invidious
discrimination, that they have equality of opportunity for socioeconomic advancement, and that
they are not ostracized when participating in the civic sphere. Assuming that we are working
within a global framework of self-governing political communities, we have special justice
obligations to compatriots that we do not have to the members of other political communities
since we affect the lives of our compatriots in distinctive and numerous political, social,
economic, and cultural ways.
The first set of rights in the equality of political standing category include the familiar
rights to vote, to run for political office, to establish political parties, to assemble freely with
others, to publicly disseminate political information, and so forth.15 These political rights protect
the equal status of members of a political community as authors of the law and ensure that they
can participate equally in the formulation of collectively binding laws. Equality of political
standing is of primary importance for individuals to attain ecological flourishing in democratic
political communities, for it is within their capacity as equal members of their political
community that they participate in its collective decision-making procedures. These rights are
the institutionalized recognition by the state of the self-legislating autonomy of its members and
of the fact that its legitimacy ultimately derives from the governed.
The second set of rights under the equality of political standing category involve
protection from the coercive power of the state to interfere with political agency by threatening
the life, liberty, security, or property of its citizens. These rights, which include what are
21
sometimes called due process rights, involve protection from illegitimate state coercion such as
ex post facto laws, submission to secret or ad hoc courts, indefinite detention without trial,
confiscation of property, selective application of the law, intimidation in the electoral process,
and double jeopardy. Also included in this set of rights that protect the citizen from the state are
individual rights to receive written notice of alleged violations, to appear in person at court
proceedings, to cross-examine witnesses, to receive advice from legal counsel, to present
testimony, evidence, and witnesses, and to receive a hearing and a written decision by an
impartial body. If members of the polity are not protected by these rights from coercive state
action, the state could employ these measures to unduly threaten or influence them and thus
selectively delimit the political activities and convictions of some of its citizens in relation to
others. In order for citizens to participate freely as equal members of a democratic community,
the coercive power of the state needs to be duly constrained by protections that enable all citizens
to freely exercise their political agency without fear of endangering their lives, liberty, security,
or property.
The second category of rights for the members of a political community are those that
protect the decisional autonomy of individuals. They include freedom of conscience, of religion,
of association, of mobility, of property, and privacy. Rights of decisional autonomy also include
rights to an adequate education and access to information technologies, as well as rights of
nondiscrimination for one’s religion, culture, language, sexual orientation, ethnic/racial
identification, and so forth. Of central importance in this set of rights is the right to an equitable
education since the development of cognitive capabilities is essential for decisional autonomy.
Jointly, the rights just mentioned provide access to the means and resources to develop the
capabilities that make the exercise of decisional autonomy possible. We should note that
22
decisional autonomy involves not only the capacity to make noncoerced choices, but also the
capacity to revise our choices in light of new information, novel experiences, changes in
affective orientations, and reasoned deliberation. This is why privacy rights and epistemological
rights are so important for decisional autonomy.
The third category of rights are basic social welfare rights, which include rights to
medical care, food, shelter, and security. In this category I also include rights of environmental
justice, which involve protection from the environmental degradation of one’s community,
intrusion into and exploitation of the resources of the homelands of indigenous peoples, and
biopiracy of ethnobotanical knowledge. Social welfare rights are perhaps the most important of
all rights, because they involve protections and resources that are needed in order for us to
function physically as human beings. As Henry Shue has famously argued, without these basic
welfare rights, none of the other rights can be meaningfully exercised.16 If one is not protected
from physical assault or if one is too ill to vote, for example, the rights protecting equality of
political standing and decisional autonomy are not very meaningful or useful because one cannot
exercise them.
Finally, the fourth category of rights within a national political community are group-
specific rights. These rights address the particular needs of vulnerable and oppressed groups and
prohibit discrimination and violence against individuals that include women, sexual minorities,
the disabled, religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, ethnocultural groups, and other vulnerable
groups. These rights may, for example, involve special provisions and services for disabled
individuals to allow them to function as full members of the political community. The strongest
and most important group-specific rights are self-governance rights, which indigenous groups,
for example, should in some cases possess to enjoy their distinctive way of life by controlling the
23
political, economic, and social institutions in their community. Also included in these category of
rights are rights for noncitizens who reside within our political community, such as refugees,
permanent resident aliens, foreign migrant workers, and undocumented residents. Such
individuals merit at least security rights, rights to medical care, and rights of due process.
Justice Obligations to Members of Other Political Communities
I turn now to our justice obligations to the members of other self-governing political
communities. We should begin by recognizing that territorialized states are the primary form of
sociopolitical organization through which people acquire legal personhood, receive basic
protections and entitlements, acquire property rights, and in general seek to flourish by resolving
collective problems that cannot be adequately addressed through individual action. However, as
territorialized political bodies, existing states acquired their national territories through such
morally illegitimate means as war, invasive settlement, broken treaties, and territorial
partitioning by imperial powers. Because of this they cannot claim unconditional or absolute
ownership or jurisdictional control of their territories and the natural resources within them.
Nevertheless, despite the illegitimate ways in which states acquired their territorial powers, the
world community grants them legitimacy as sovereign political communities. I maintain that
states incur a moral debt to the world community by the latter’s recognition of the territorial
powers that underpin their sovereignty and that this moral debt should be primarily reciprocated
by states acknowledging that they have justice obligations to the members of other political
communities. More particularly, we could see territorialized sovereign political communities as
administrative units managing sectors of the earth for the purpose of enabling ecological
flourishing, but whose legitimacy is conditional on their participating in a global division of
labor that crucially involves the just treatment of other political communities and their members.
24
The principles of global justice that follow in effect articulate the conditions of fairness that we
have a justice obligation to uphold in order to safeguard the capacity for ecological flourishing of
human beings within sociopolitical and natural environments.
International justice obligations are articulated in terms of four principles of global justice
which give rise to corresponding sets of rights. The first global justice principle is the fair access
to natural resources principle. The moral intuition on which this global justice principle is based
is that since all humans have equal moral worth and need the earth’s resources—which no person
or group of persons created—to survive and flourish, all humans should have egalitarian access
to these resources17. Since I am working with the realistic assumption that self-governing
territorially based states will continue to exist for the foreseeable future, my goal is to find a way
to equalize access to the earth’s resources while recognizing that decisions about access and use
of resources will likely remain, at least for the short term, under state control.
Human egalitarian access to the earth’s natural resources can be understood in different
ways, including equal individual resource claims, equal participation in collective decisions
regarding natural resources, or ongoing equal and unimpeded access to these resources. Given
the likely continued existence of self-governing political communities with territorial and
jurisdictional powers, I will understand human egalitarian fair access within this context. This
means that we cannot construe egalitarian fair access in terms of global collective decision-
making related to using resources, for there is no global government or parliamentary body with
the capacity or authority to carry out such complex decision-making processes. Recognizing
states with territorial powers involves acknowledging that the members of political communities
determine the disposition of their territorial resources. Neither can we embrace equal ongoing
unimpeded access to the world’s resources, given that border controls are a central part of state
25
territorial powers.18 This leaves us with the first option, which encompasses approaches that
advocate egalitarian ownership claims of the world’s natural resources while recognizing that
states retain the right to make decisions regarding their resources, such as their rate of extraction
and conditions of their use, exchange, and sale. Also, since we have embraced sustainability as a
background commitment, our conception of egalitarian fair access should embody a commitment
to sustainability.
Two prominent proposals to institutionalize egalitarian fair access are Hillel Steiner’s
global fund and Thomas Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend. Steiner advocates universal
sharing of the value of the earth’s resources by means of a global tax on the market value of the
resources located in territories owned by states, including sub-terranean and above ground
natural resources.19 States would be taxed the same amount that their natural resource holdings
would rent for at current world market prices and the accumulated global tax would be equally
distributed to every person in the world. Another prominent proposal is Pogge’s Global
Resources Dividend (GRD).20 The GRD would tax the use or sale of natural resources rather than
their ownership. Since political communities would not be required to extract or use their
resources, but would be taxed only if they decided to do so, the GRD would respect the territorial
power of political communities to decide how to use their natural resources. Tax revenues from
the GRD would be distributed to those who fall below a certain poverty threshold. There are
serious problems with both Steiner’s and Pogge’s proposals, the most important of which are that
they do not take into account the ecological dimensions of economic production and
consumption or the inequalities in consumption between countries that go beyond the use of their
own national resources. An ecologically based perspective does not face these shortcomings.
26
We should first of all recognize that processes of production and consumption involve
not only the ongoing use of resources, but also the continuing capacity of the environment to
assimilate the wastes created. That is, renewable stocks of resources as well as environmental
sinks are important in determining the life-sustaining capacity of the earth, which is what is
really crucial for our survival and flourishing. An ecological perspective that incorporates these
insights is based on the concept of ecological space. Tim Hayward defines ecological space as
“the total amount of biologically productive land and water area required to produce the
resources consumed and to assimilate the wastes generated using prevailing technology.”21
Ecological space measures the life-sustaining renewable resources, including stocks and
environmental sinks, used by a given population and the amount of ecological space used by a
particular country could be understood as its ecological footprint. The footprint is measured in
terms of global hectares, which are units that measure the average productivity (per hectare) of
all biologically productive areas in the world. A country’s footprint is determined by subtracting
exports and adding imports to its domestic production. Using the notion of ecological footprint,
we can determine whether a country’s level of consumption exceeds or falls below the earth’s
ability to regenerate its life-sustaining biocapacities.
There are many important advantages to using this ecologically oriented approach. First,
the concept of ecological space is a more appropriate measure than the simple concept of
“resources” that thinkers like Steiner and Pogge employ to understand egalitarian resource
sharing. It is not mere resources but an equal share of the earth’s life-sustaining capacities that
every human being is entitled to. Second, the concept of ecological space—by identifying the
total amount of the earth’s biologically productive land, water, and absorption capacities a
country uses—avoids the erroneous assumption that a country’s violation of egalitarian standards
27
in the use of the earth’s resources can be understood solely in terms of its national natural
resource endowment. Third, the fair access ecological perspective regards differences in
consumption levels between countries as justifiable if they result from more efficient use of the
earth’s biocapacities. A country can have a level of consumption that is higher than the global
per capita consumption level as long as this is achieved by means of a more efficient use of its
allotted share of the earth’s life-sustaining biocapacities. It is not consumption levels per se that
are taxed, but rather disproportionate use of a common global biocapacity resource base. This
should act as an incentive for countries to adopt economic practices that have a smaller
ecological footprint. Fourth, because the size of a country’s ecological footprint strongly
correlates with its wealth, the ecological approach has the added advantage of capturing the
intuition that wealthy countries consume a greater share of the earth’s biological sustaining
capacities.22
Using this ecological understanding of what constitutes an egalitarian share of the earth’s
biocapacities, a tax would be imposed on those countries that consume more than their per capita
share of the earth’s biocapacities. These taxes, however, should be designed so that poor
communities in developed countries, who often bear the brunt of environmental degradation, are
not additionally burdened. The revenue generated by the global taxes would be used to satisfy
the basic needs—such as access to clean water and other nutritional needs, medical care,
education, and shelter—of the people in the world’s neediest and most vulnerable countries.
These are the individuals who use the lowest levels of ecological space and it is just for those
who exceed their equitable share to contribute a portion of their wealth to satisfy the basic
survival needs of the world’s neediest people.
28
In summary, the principle of fair access to natural resources is grounded on the moral
intuition that human animals have a right to equally access the earth’s life-sustaining
biocapacities to survive and flourish. Since persons are moral equals, they have egalitarian rights
to an equal share of the earth’s biocapacities. This right can be institutionalized by means of a
global tax on a political community’s use of biocapacities, beyond their equitable share, that
would be sufficient to satisfy the basic needs of the world’s most impoverished people.
The second principle of global justice is the ecological integrity principle. In our discussion
of the area of moral concern dealing with inequitable opportunities for ecological flourishing, we
noted that the ongoing flourishing of human and nonhuman animals are intrinsic goods that
entail moral concern for bringing about the state of affairs in which this kind of flourishing can
be realized. The principle of ecological integrity asserts that political communities have a moral
responsibility to preserve the biophysical capacities of the earth that are necessary to support the
life of human and nonhuman animals and the development and exercise of their species-specific
capacities. In other words, political communities should be morally concerned with safeguarding
what is environmentally necessary to make the intrinsic good of ecological flourishing possible
for human and nonhuman animals. Because the biosphere is essential for the ecological
flourishing of beings with moral status, territorialized political bodies have an obligation to
maintain its ecological integrity. Ultimately, any attempt to redress inequitable ecological
flourishing will be unsuccessful unless we safeguard what is essential for ecological flourishing
to be realized in the first place.
The biosphere on which we all depend consists of interconnected ecosystems that are not
always entirely located in the territorial sectors controlled by particular political communities,
but extend beyond their territorial boundaries. Activities such as the pollution of bodies of water,
29
the release of toxic chemicals into the air, the warming of the earth’s surface temperature through
the burning of fossil fuels, the creation of acid rain, and the cutting of forest trees do not affect
just the particular territorial sectors controlled by the political communities engaged in these
activities, they affect areas beyond national boundaries given the interconnectedness of
ecosystems. Thus, even if states had morally unconditional ownership claims to the natural
resources within their territories, many forms of environmental degradation cross their territorial
boundaries and so they would still have to be mindful of how they treat the biophysical sectors of
the earth that they control.
Even if we restrict our attention to the particular territories under their control, states cannot
circumvent their responsibilities to maintain their ecological integrity by appealing to their
territorial powers. As observed earlier, states do not have morally unconditional ownership of
their territories, for they acquired their territorial powers through morally illegitimate means such
as conquest, invasive settlement, broken treaties, and partitioning among imperial powers. Thus,
territorialized political communities cannot appeal to morally unconditional claims of territorial
ownership to justify practices that undermine the health and fecundity of the ecosystems within
their territories. Because no individual or collectivity created the earth, the biosphere should be
considered as the collective endowment of all living beings, and no national group can claim an
absolute and unrestricted right to treat the territorial sectors of the biosphere under its control in
any way it unilaterally decides. This is particularly important given that future generations will
need clean water, fertile soil, unpolluted air, and biologically fecund ecosystems to satisfy their
basic needs. The relationship between political communities and their territories should be seen
as one of environmental stewardship and not one of unrestricted ownership of natural resources.
Even though we can recognize that self-governance grants political communities certain
30
decision-making capacities regarding the use of their natural resources, these capacities are not
unlimited and exclude decisions that systematically or significantly undermine the ability of the
sectors of the biosphere under their control to sustain life.
Concerning human political communities, some of the most serious violations of
ecological integrity involve the environmental degradation of the life-places of poor
communities and communities of people of color.23 Even though many of these cases of
environmental degradation involve domestic policies, at the international level multinational
corporations and the powerful states in which they are based are often responsible for the
poisoning and destruction of the natural environments in which these communities are situated.
The third principle is that of fair economic cooperation. This principle consists of two
parts. The first deals with a fair international system of economic production, trade, and labor
rights, and the second deals with a just global system of immigration policies systematically
integrated into programs of economic development for poor countries. The first part of this
principle addresses the moral concerns arising from nondiscretionary state participation in the
global economic order while the second addresses some of the injustices arising from the
territorial and jurisdictional powers of states. Unlike the other three principles of global justice,
this principle deals primarily with human animals and only peripherally with nonhuman animals,
since the latter do not participate in rule-structured economic trade. However, the role of animals
in WACs in creating and sustaining the biological fecundity of the earth’s ecosystems will be
briefly considered.
Starting with the first part of the principle, since the economic welfare of most countries
now depends on their capacity to participate successfully in the global economy, all participating
countries should be able to do so on fair terms of production, trade, and labor. But why should
31
economic relations between states be governed by norms of justice rather than market norms of
self-interest? Global economic justice duties are generated by the facts that states are trading
products created from a common resource base from which they draw the stocks and other
biocapacities for production while restricting the access that other states have to those sectors of
the resource base over which they claim proprietary control through their illegitimately acquired
territorial powers. It is these facts, and not global trade per se or economic interdependence,
which bind territorialized states into a normatively structured global system of economic
cooperation. Of particular importance is that the continuing recognition by the world community
of illegitimately acquired state territorial powers creates a moral debt that states incur in relations
to the world community.
Because the basic purpose of accessing the earth’s resources and biocapacities is to
survive and flourish, it is reasonable to propose that this moral debt is most naturally fulfilled by
territorialized political communities participating in a fair global economic system designed to
promote the flourishing of all political communities. Conceiving of the world economy as a
morally principled global division of labor means that the normative conditions governing the
world economy should optimize the capacity of all self-governing political communities to
benefit from economic production and trade so that the ecological flourishing of their members
can be enhanced. Since ecological flourishing involves the sustainable development and exercise
of peoples’ species-specific capacities, this means that the global system of inter-state economic
cooperation should prioritize providing all human beings with the resources and opportunities to
achieve at least a basic level of ecological flourishing. If all countries are to participate in a fair
global system of economic cooperation between states with territorial and jurisdictional powers
that are only conditionally justifiable, it is reasonable and just that this economic system grant
32
priority to the attainment of at least a basic level of sustainable flourishing for all as a normative
condition for their voluntary good faith participation.
But given the significant differences in such factors as advantages of scale, educational
training of their workforce, ownership of intellectual property, and level of economic
development that exist between countries, merely removing trade barriers will likely not enable
developing countries to participate on fair terms in the global economy. The additional factors
that need to be addressed for fair economic global cooperation fall into three categories: (1)
negative externalities, (2) unfair use of trade barriers and subsidies, and (3) special protection for
developing countries.24 Negative externalities are ways in which industries achieve greater
success and competitiveness by shifting the cost of production to workers, the community, or the
environment. Shifting cost of production to workers may involve exploitative wages, child labor,
suppression of collective bargaining, or unsafe working conditions. Lowering the costs of
production can also be achieved by environmental degradation, including dumping toxic
chemicals into bodies of water, polluting the air, and excessive use of pesticides to increase crop
yields. It is far cheaper, for example, to dump the harmful byproducts of industrial processes into
the environment than investing in technologies to neutralize and properly dispose of these toxic
byproducts. Communities can also bear the brunt of negative externalization when the health of
their members is endangered by degradation of their life-places or when their way of life is
threatened, for instance, by logging or mining industries that disregard the sociocultural impact
of their activities. The elimination of negative externalities could be institutionalized, for
example, by instituting standards for environmental protection, establishing international
standards for nonexploitiative wages, prohibiting child labor, recognizing collective bargaining
rights, and introducing standards for worker safety.
33
Unfair use of trade barriers and subsidies is one of the major ways in which developed
countries attain greater competitiveness at the cost of developing countries. In their trade
practices rich countries often impose higher tariffs on products from developing countries than
on products from other developed nations.25 Rich countries also heavily subsidize agricultural
products intended for export, thus hindering the capacity of poor countries to compete globally
on products in which they would otherwise be competitive. Given their more limited economic
resources, it is practically impossible for poor countries to respond by subsidizing their products
in return. Fair terms of economic cooperation should thus include the elimination of tariffs
limiting the access that poor countries have to the markets of developed countries and the
elimination of subsidies that limit the ability of developing nations to compete on global markets.
Finally, a system of fair economic cooperation whose goal is the economic flourishing of
all nations should acknowledge that developing countries suffer from multiple disadvantages that
hinder their capacity to compete on fair terms in the global economy, such as weak institutions
and infrastructures, unproductive soils, undiversified industries, greater vulnerability to natural
disasters, poor access to health, education, and other social services, and limited access to
information and communication technologies.26 A policy that would help the weakest economies
would provide them with preferential access to the markets of more economically developed
countries. Joseph Stiglitz has proposed that countries should be willing to provide free market
access to those developing countries that have a smaller total GDP and a smaller GDP per capita
than they have. Preferential market access would thus be distributed progressively according to
well-defined criteria.27 This agreement would be binding on both developed and developing
nations. A country like Egypt, for example, would provide free market access to the goods from
a country like Uganda with a smaller total and per capita GPA. But in exchange Egypt would
34
obtain free market access to its goods from a larger and richer country than itself, such as the
U.S. In brief, eliminating negative externalities, removing trade barriers and subsidies, and
providing the poorest countries with graduated preferential access to the markets of more
developed countries would be significant steps in instituting a just global system of economic
cooperation.
The second component of the principle of fair economic cooperation proposes a global
system of migration policies strategically designed to alleviate global economic inequalities. The
contemporary global economy involves increased international movement of goods, services,
and capital but notably not the free and legalized cross-national movement of workers. The
global economy enhances the opportunities of the owners of capital to profit while relying on the
jurisdictional powers of states to restrict the movement of labor. This represents an unjust
imbalance in the economic opportunities of workers and capitalists to participate equitably and
fairly in the global economy. Fair worker participation in the global economy would involve
greater access of workers to foreign labor markets. As I have argued elsewhere,28 a policy of
open borders seems like the reasonable response to this difference in economic opportunities, but
this would be a serious mistake because it would worsen the welfare of the least advantaged
people left behind in countries of origin. It is well known from migration studies that the well-
educated, young, able-bodied, and most capable individuals are more likely to emigrate from
poor countries than the elderly, the infirm, the very young, and the very poor.29 Open borders
would exacerbate the exodus of some of the most educated, talented, skilled, and entrepreneurial
individuals from developing countries. A new order of global inequality would likely emerge
from open borders, one in which wealthy countries become more diverse and enriched by the
35
human talent from developing countries while the latter lose some of their most capable citizens
in whose education they have invested scarce resources.
Empirical evidence shows that some developing countries are already suffering from the
emigration of some of their most talented citizens in whose education they have invested scarce
resources.30 Rather than favoring open borders, just immigration policies should grant priority to
needed low-skilled workers from the poorest developing countries to access labor markets in
wealthy countries. Thus, the second part of the principle of fair economic participation proposes
a global system of migration policies that encourages return and circular migration to optimize
the beneficial effects of remittances on developing countries. Remittances, which constitute the
greatest source of foreign income to developing nations, totaled 414 billion dollars in 2013
according to the World Bank.31 By comparison, total development aid was just 134.8 billion
dollars that same year.32 Returning migrants also help their communities by their increased
knowledge, skills, capital, and contacts. Some developing countries have programs that provide
incentives for migrants to retain their connections to their communities and to return.33 In short,
immigration policies strategically designed to help the world’s poorest people are more morally
justifiable that open borders because they embody special concern for the capacity of the
globally most vulnerable to satisfy their basic needs, which as we have seen is a concern that
morally underlies the global system of economic cooperation between states with territorial and
jurisdictional powers.
The fourth principle is that of nondomination, which has some components that apply
uniquely to humans and others that apply to nonhuman animals in WACs. This principle is a
response to the areas of moral concern dealing with inequitable ecological flourishing, the
territorial and jurisdictional powers of states, and the participation of states in political and
36
economic global orders. Regarding humans, basically this principle requires countries to refrain
from using their greater political, military, or economic power to dominate weaker countries. If
the justification for granting legitimacy to a global configuration of self-governing sociopolitical
communities with territorial and jurisdictional powers is that it makes possible an economic and
political division of labor to promote universal ecological flourishing, it is reasonable and fair
that this process proceed under conditions in which no political community is under the
domination of another. This position will provide the baseline on the basis of which we will
determine which relations or agreements between countries involve domination.
Here I understand domination in terms of relationships between political communities
that contravene the moral imperatives of a global political and economic division of labor
structured to achieve universal ecological flourishing. More precisely, for our purposes
domination between political communities is understood as an institutional relationship in which
one political community employs its greater political, military, or economic power to undermine
the capacity of another political community to attain ecological flourishing.
To understand domination defined in this way, it is instructive to briefly see how
political, military, and economic forms of power can be used to undermine the capacity of
countries to attain ecological flourishing. We have already seen how economic power can be
used by more developed countries to dominate developing countries, so here I focus succinctly
on political and military forms of domination. At the political level, powerful countries can use
their position or influence in international bodies such as the United Nations to block actions by
the international community to condemn their aggressive actions against other states or their ill
treatment of substate groups. Powerful countries can also use their political influence over
weaker nations to control their domestic politics by economically and politically supporting
37
political figures sympathetic to the dominant country. The U.S. in the 1980s, for example,
established client regimes in Latin American countries that served American interests, often to
the detriment of their own population.34 Stronger international institutions need to be developed
that can hold politically powerful countries accountable for their attempts to coerce weaker
nations to do their bidding. Presently, the absence of democratic political accountability for
abuses of power at the international level is a major reason for the pervasiveness of forms of
political domination that occur between stronger and weaker countries.35
Another form of power in interstate relations is military power. Countries can use their
military power in a variety of ways to overthrow or undermine governments that challenge their
hegemonic power, such as through military invasion, strategic bombing, arming of subversive
groups, use of military advisors, the closing of borders, and the mining of harbors. Sometimes
the mere threat of military force is sufficient for militarily powerful countries to dominate
weaker countries. Economic power is also an effective tool of interstate domination. Wealthy
countries sometimes use their economic power to control or unduly influence economically
weaker nations or substate populations by blocking loans from international financial institutions
such as the World Bank, excluding them from regional trade agreements, threatening to cut or
actually cutting economic aid, preventing them from accessing the markets of developed
countries, or organizing international economic sanctions.
But a just global order should not only prohibit relations of domination between states, it
should also proscribe the domination of substate groups by central governments. This is a much
neglected but important aspect of global justice. Ethnocultural groups striving to attain self-
governance rights—such as the Kurds in Iraq, the Maya in Mexico, the Catalonians in Spain, and
the Aymaras in Chile—have often experienced discrimination and oppression at the hands of the
38
majority society. These groups, who are typically territorially concentrated, regard themselves as
culturally distinct communities who were deprived of their autonomy and forcibly incorporated
into the state. While some of these ethnocultural groups may seek independent statehood, many
of them would achieve their sociopolitical goals by attaining self-governance or various degrees
of autonomy from the central state. The principle of nondomination should also apply to the
relationship between states and these autonomist groups, because states should respond justly to
their demands for self-determination, particularly where there is clear historical evidence that
they were self-governing political communities before their forced or nonvoluntary incorporation
into the state. The specifics dealing with the just treatment of these groups are too complex to
discuss here and I have examined them in detail elsewhere.36 Suffice it to say that this is an
important component of global justice that has been greatly overlooked by writers on the subject.
Justice Obligations to Future Generations
Any discussion of justice obligations to future generations must address the infamous
non-identity problem, which raises doubts concerning the moral obligations that living people
have to future generations. A common way of understanding harming an individual involves
performing an action that makes them worse off after the action than they were before the action
was undertaken. If this is so, it is not clear that we can harm a future individual by an action
undertaken at present, such as degrading the environment, for we cannot say that this individual
was better off before the action was undertaken for she did not exist at all. Moreover, we could
argue that, assuming that future people will value their existence and prefer to exist than not to
exist, living people on balance will not harm them because our environmentally destructive
policies will change the course of history and be responsible for their existence. From these lines
of reasoning one could argue that living people cannot (everything considered) harm future
39
people, since we cannot compare their state of being before and after the allegedly harmful
action was performed and because our harmful practices will make their existence possible
(which presumably they will value more than their nonexistence under all but the most extreme
circumstances).37 Thus, living people cannot be said to have justice obligations to future
generations since it is not clear how living people can on balance them harm in the first place.
The conundrum here is that our moral intuitions presumably tell us that we can indeed harm
future generations by preventing them from living flourishing lives by our uncaringly
overconsuming natural resources or degrading the environment, yet the non-identity problem
ingeniously appears to show that we cannot really harm future people.
Lukas Meyer has proposed a resolution of the non-identity problem by arguing that it
needlessly assumes a definition of harm that depends on identifying specific individuals harmed
by an action before and after the action is performed.38 He proposes an alternative understanding
of harm, which he calls a subjunctive-threshold conception, according to which living people can
harm future people even if the latter did not exist when the harmful action was performed, as
long as living people undertake actions that create conditions responsible for future people living
under a threshold of well-being. Moreover, harm can occur even if the living persons caused the
future people to come into existence as a result of their ostensibly harmful actions. In discussions
of the non-identity problem it is often pointed out that the alleged harm that living people may
cause future people is minimized or overridden by the fact that—assuming that it is better to
exist than not to exist—the harmful actions performed by living people benefit future people by
bringing them into existence. It is also important to note that Meyer does not intend his
subjunctive-threshold definition of harm to cover all forms of harm, but only to make sense of
situations in which the living can harm people who not yet exist.
40
By combining Meyer’s subjunctive-threshold conception of harm with the idea that our
basic justice obligation is to safeguard the capacity for ecological flourishing of beings with
moral status, we arrive at the view that we can harm future people if we prevent them from
reaching a level of well-being in which they can develop and exercise their species-specific
capacities in a sustainable manner. Our obligations to future people are based on the ecological
relationship of our living in the same planet, the sociopolitical relationship of their inheriting our
institutional structures, and on their possessing moral status (even though they do not exist at
present they will likely exist and will have needs and interests that we can undermine).
Several qualifications need to be made to the conception of harm we are using. First, since there
are many factors that will affect the welfare of future people that we cannot ascertain and that we
are not responsible for—such as their support for conservation policies, new technological
developments, and the pervasiveness of social and economic inequalities—our justice
obligations are limited to those factors that we can control. Since we can assume that future
generations will need biologically productive ecological space, our justice obligations should
center on maintaining a sufficient amount of the earth’s life-sustaining biocapacities so they can
lead reasonably flourishing lives. The most important strategy is for existing people to live in
conformity with the biosphere’s capacity to support life by developing sustainable institutional
structures that future generations will inherit. Second, because the amount of global per capita
ecological space will decrease as population increases, another important step is to restrain
population growth. In a biosphere with limited natural resources, limiting population growth is a
central justice obligation not only to future people, but also to future animals and plants. One of
the most important reasons for species extinction of animals and plants is the intrusion,
destruction, and degradation of their habitats caused by the growth of human populations. Third,
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our responsibilities to future people, animals, and plants should be balanced with those we have
to existing humans. This is another reason for limiting population growth, namely, that the more
people come into existence the harder it is to satisfy their needs while honoring our justice
obligations to future people, animals, and plants.
Justice Obligations to Animals and Plants
As we will recall, there are three categories of beings with moral status besides people,
namely, animals who are subjects-of-a-life, animals who are not subjects-of-a-life but are
sentient, and nonsentient animals and plants. Because animals and plants share living spaces with
humans in political communities but also inhabit regions with little if any human contact, our
justice obligations to them should cover both of these scenarios. I start by discussing our moral
responsibilities to animals living within human communities, continue by examining our
obligations to animals living in their own separate communities, and then briefly discuss our
justice obligations to plants.
Donaldson and Kymlicka have developed a political theory of animal rights that takes
into account not merely their normatively relevant intrinsic features, but also the sociopolitical
relationships we have to them.39 I adopt significant segments of their theory, but disagree with
them in certain crucial respects, which will become clear as we proceed. Donaldson and
Kymlicka divide our justice obligations to animals that live within human communities into two
categories, those of domesticated and liminal animals. As they point out, domesticated animals
have been integrated into our society by confinement and selective breeding, and have often been
used for forced labor, as food, for producing food, and for other human services. The category of
domesticated animals includes pets, animals used for labor such as donkeys and shepherd dogs,
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animals used for producing food or raw materials for human products, and service animals such
as seeing-eye dogs. Because they have moral status, have been forced to depend on humans for
their well-being, and have been incorporated into human communities, domesticated animals
merit rights that are similar to those possessed by human community members, such as
protection from preventable harms, access to medical care, a living space, food, and water,
avoidance of unnecessary restrictions on their mobility, and the right to basic socialization (for
example, I do not want my Rottweiler to attack other dogs or my neighbors).
The category of liminal animals include animals that live in our communities—such as
raccoons, pigeons, squirrels, and mice—but are not domesticated and do not have the close
dependence relationships that domesticated animals typically have with humans. Even though, as
Donaldson and Kymlicka indicate, our moral obligations to liminal animals are not as strong as
they are to domesticated animals, they are still entitled to rights of protection from abuse and
exploitation by humans.40 Their interests need to be taken into account when carrying out human
projects that affect their living spaces, such as the construction of roads, dams, and buildings.
Their need for natural resources and a living space should be taken into account when humans
make decisions regarding land development for human purposes. Because liminal animals have
moral status and live within human communities, they should be granted consideration as living
beings with their own needs and vulnerabilities. However, unlike domesticated animals whose
well-being is already strongly dependent on our care, ensuring that liminal animals are protected
from predators or have adequate medical care, for example, would involve excessive interference
with their autonomy, for they would have to be captured or their mobility severely restricted to
ensure that they received such protection. With both domesticated and liminal animals, the basic
purpose of the rights I have outlined is to safeguard their capacity to attain ecological flourishing,
43
that is, sustainable flourishing in the natural and sociopolitical environments in which live
through the development and free exercise of their species-specific capacities.
Moving now to animals that live apart from humans in their own habitats, such as spider
monkeys, sloths, and toucans living in the Amazon rainforest, Donaldson and Kymlicka argue
that we should conceive of wild animal communities (WACS) as sovereign self-governing
communities analogous to human sovereign political communities.41 Here I part company with
these authors, for I maintain that the concept of self-governance, properly understood, involves at
a minimum a certain degree of deliberation on collective decisions by the community. Any truly
self-governing community will also involve input and some form of consent from the governed.
But wild animal communities exemplify neither of these essential features, for they neither
deliberate nor obtain input on collectively binding decisions from all the species making up the
community. I also differ from Donaldson and Kymlicka in that I grant moral status to plants and
take them into account in identifying our moral obligations to wild animal communities.
But even though WACs are not self-governing, they are certainly self-determining in the
sense that they consist of animals and plants independently and collectively striving to survive
and flourish within their natural environment. Since in my theory these beings have intrinsic
value and thus moral status, like humans they have the right of fair access to the earth’s
biocapacities in order to flourish. We could straightforwardly claim that, like humans, they are
entitled to an equal proportional share of the earth’s biocapacities. Since we are in some ways
treating WACs like human self-determining communities we could, after adjusting for their
species-specific needs, support the right of their members to an egalitarian share of the earth’s
life-sustaining biocapacities. This position, however, would not be defensible. First, since WACs
typically consist of an enormous number of widely differing species, their biophysical needs are
44
correspondingly very different. It would be an epistemically insurmountable task to determine
the share of the earth’s biocapacity to which the members of each species is entitled. Assuming
that ought implies can, it is not clear how we ought to uphold or support this right without being
able to identify what the member of each species is entitled to. Second, and more important,
given the large number of predator-prey relationships in WACs, it is not even clear whether we
could consistently uphold or safeguard the entitlements that some nonhuman animals would have
to their share of the earth’s biocapacities. Since a fox in the wild, for example, needs rabbits for
its survival, the fox’s right for its biocapacity share would violate the ability of the rabbit to
employ its biocapacity share for its flourishing. Since prey are an important part of the earth’s
life-sustaining biocapacities on which predators depend, we could not consistently safeguard the
entitlements of both predators and their prey to shares of the earth’s biocapacities to promote
their flourishing, for upholding predator-species access to their shares would result in denying
some members of prey-species the capacity to enjoy their share. This suggests that there is a
deep conceptual incoherence in trying to apply the same principles of egalitarian fair access to
humans and to nonhuman animals in WACs.
In general, we encounter serious problems if we try to treat WACs in precisely the same
way we should treat human political communities. For how would we implement norms of
justice like equality or compensation in our relations and negotiations with the members of
WACs? We obviously cannot negotiate with them to arrive at terms of fair agreement or
compensate them in ways that we can confidently claim are proportionate or just. For instance,
when compensation seems appropriate, which particular members of WACs should we
compensate and how? Should small lizards and insects receive the same kind of compensation
and reciprocal treatment as psychologically complex mammals like wolves, elk, and bears? How
45
would we insure that all species of WACs are equitably compensated? Given the great number of
species in WACs and the complexity of the inter-species relationships between them, it is not
even clear whether we can make sense of the ideal of equitable and just compensation to all of
their members.
But even though fair access to the earth biocapacities cannot be understood in the same
way when dealing about human political communities and nonhuman animals in WACs, our
moral obligations to the members of the latter communities are still very significant. Earlier we
observed that we can justifiably conceive of WACs as self-determining communities of beings
independently striving to adapt to their environment to achieve flourishing. With regards to their
fair access to natural resources, this means that we should consider their natural habitats as
belonging to them and not as unclaimed depositories of resources that humans can freely
appropriate. Egalitarian fair access for nonhuman animals in WACs entails their right to
collectively and independently employ the earth’s biocapacities within their territories for their
survival and flourishing without undue human interference. In those cases in which nonhuman
animals in WACs are not confined to a particular bioregion but engage in seasonal migration,
they have the right to cross territories that are part of human political communities. Just as
migratory human groups can rightfully cross into WACs if it is necessary for them to temporarily
do so to secure their safety or well-being, so should nonhuman animals be granted the
corresponding right.
Further, humans should refrain from inflicting both direct and indirect harm to their
habitats and their members. Inflicting direct harm involves, for instance, intruding into their
habitats to establish unnecessary human settlements, building nonessential human infrastructures
that degrade the viability of their ecosystems, and invading their territories for extracting
46
nonessential resources. Examples of indirect interference include increasing global warming
leading to detrimental climate changes, generating acid rain that acidifies bodies of water with
low buffering capacity, using synthetic chemicals that pollute their environment and harm their
reproductive capacities, and destruction of the ozone layer by the use of chlorofluorocarbons
leading to excessive ultraviolet radiation on wildlife and their sources of food. Moreover, it is not
morally legitimate for humans to proliferate without regard to the ways in which increasing
human populations intrude into WACs. It is well established that habitat destruction, caused
primarily by the harvesting of natural resources and human intrusion into WACs, is the major
reason for diminishing biodiversity, including loss of nonhuman animal species.42 Wetlands,
coral reefs, tropical rainforests, tallgrass prairies, and savannas have all been decimated through
human invasion and resource expropriation. Population control is a politically and culturally
sensitive issue, but it is centrally important for the just treatment of nonhuman animals in WACs.
Human beings should recognize that the earth’s resources and life-spaces are limited and that
they have a moral responsibility to share them with nonhuman animals by restraining their own
proliferation.43
When dealing with essential human interests that cannot be feasibly satisfied in any other
way, humans can legitimately access needed resources in WACs. Instances of such important
human interests include accessing food sources to satisfy survival needs, building needed
residential structures for shelter and constructing urgently needed roads, bridges, and dams
essential for humans living a basically decent life. Other examples of important human interests
include procuring medicinal plants needed for medical research to cure serious human illnesses,
obtaining minerals necessary for renewable-energy technologies, and conducting important
environmentally related scientific research. This is morally justifiable given that the life-
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sustaining spaces of the earth are the common patronage of all beings with moral status. Just as
there are legitimate, though limited, moral claims that human members of political communities
can make on the life-sustaining resources or biocapacities of other human political communities,
there are legitimate claims that humans can make on the ecological resources of WACs. Further,
these claims are generally stronger than the ones that human communities can make on one
another, given that, as I have argued, humans have a higher moral status than nonhuman animals.
But again, it is crucial to curve human population growth, for once a human being comes into
existence their essential survival needs outweigh the needs of beings with lesser moral status.
When conflicts of interest arise between beings with moral status whether within or
outside of our political communities, we will use the principle of priority of comparable interests.
According to this principle, when there is a conflict between similar or comparable interests of
beings with moral status, the interests of the beings with higher moral status have priority. For
instance, when there is a limited amount of resources that can meet the survival needs of only
one of two categories of beings with moral status, since survival needs are similar or comparable,
the needs of the beings with higher moral status should predominate. But when the survival or
basic interests of beings with lower moral status conflict with nonessential or frivolous interests
of beings with higher moral status, the interests of the former should take precedence because the
interests are not comparable and those of the being with lower moral status are more important.
This principle would prohibit killing animals for making fur coats since the competing interests
in this case are not comparable. Killing animals for food if human nutritional needs can be met
by vegetarian sources would be prohibited, because eating animal protein would not be essential
to satisfy human nutritional needs. But vegetarianism is consistent with the principle because
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human survival needs trump those of plants and the only viable alternative to vegetarianism
involves eating animals, whose comparable survival interests trump those of plants.
I have not fully developed my view of our justice obligations to plants. It will suffice to
say here that many of the same normative considerations that I have discussed with regards to
WACs apply to plants, since typically WACs are heavily populated with plants as well as
nonhuman animals. A proviso worth mentioning, however, is that our right to access plants for
human purposes are even stronger than they are with regards to nonhuman animals in WACs,
given their lower degree of moral status in the normative classificatory scheme I am employing.
But like wilderness animals, plants in WACs also have a right to flourish free from unnecessary
intrusion from humans into their habitats. In general, the use and extraction of plants and the
intrusion into their habitats would be subject to similar constraints as those I have identified for
WACs.
Planetary Ethics as a Cosmic Narrative
Planetary ethics is a self-standing ethical theory. This should be kept in mind even if one
disagrees with the more speculative remarks I make in this section. Some of the most powerful
insights regarding planetary ethics relate to its potential as a new paradigm for the way human
beings think of themselves as well as moral consciousness and its role in human history. New
developments in the physical and biological sciences enable us to situate ethics within its proper
place in cosmic evolution and to understand its relevance for our future development as a
species. Cosmology, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, non-equilibrium thermodynamics,
and the science of self-organization have convincingly shown that the universe has an enormous
capacity for self-organization and for developing increasingly complex structures.44 As
astrophysicist Eric Chaisson points out, elementary particles, atoms, galaxies, stars, planets,
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simple life forms, conscious animals, and human moral agents all evolved following basically
the same physical principles.45
With the development of living beings, value emerged in the universe, for it mattered to
the organism whether it succeeded in its efforts to find food, avoid predators, or reproduce. In the
long arduous evolutionary process that started with the development of basic elements and
cosmic structures, proceeded with the emergence of simple organisms seeking their own species-
specific goods, then followed by the advent of humans, nature has organized basic elements like
hydrogen, phosphorous, nitrogen, and carbon into highly complex adaptive systems (human
beings) capable of thinking, feeling, reasoning, and making moral judgments. Indeed, nature has
used basically the same organizational principles to give rise to the complexity of different kinds
of structured entities in the universe, including human beings.46 It is not necessary to assume here
that nature self-consciously or purposefully directed human evolution towards moral
consciousness or that there is a divine architect that designed nature to evolve in this manner.
Humans are the most complex ordered structures in the known universe, and the fact that our
evolution is continuous with the evolution of cosmic structures as well as other life forms raises
the question of the role of human morality for life on earth and the evolution of our species.
Since we are thinking earth, nature rendered morally self-conscious, what is the role of our moral
consciousness in this evolutionary process?
Evolutionary biologist Holmes Rolston47 and evolutionary anthropologist Christopher
Boehm48 have argued that morality emerged in human societies because it increased adaptive
fitness, that is, it enabled individuals to survive and flourish in the small relatively homogeneous
tribal groups in which they lived. But some tribal bands eventually recognized that constant
inter-tribal conflict was costly and that there were mutual group and individual benefits to
50
cooperation, alliances, and economic trade. We have now developed into a world of
interconnected and interdependent states that have a mutual interest in protecting, on the one
hand, natural global public goods such as clean air, healthy fisheries, species biodiversity, and
fertile soils and, on the other, sociopolitical global public goods such as international peace,
respect for international law, intrastate stability, global security, and widely accessible
cyberspace. We can reasonably maintain that these global public goods, which enhance general
well-being, would be more likely achieved and protected in a world which respects the justice
obligations in the four domains of justice I have discussed.
Justice is in general adaptive, in the sense that it promotes the ecological flourishing of
individuals and other beings with moral status, while injustice is maladaptive. It is not
coincidental that the fundamental overarching moral principle that underlies planetary ethics
involves safeguarding the capacity of beings with moral status to survive and flourish in natural
and sociopolitical environments. For instance, treating women justly involves in part enabling
them to develop and exercise capacities essential for their flourishing, such as autonomy and
informed self-direction, through policies like educational empowerment and reproductive rights,
which in turn support smaller families and restrain overpopulation. Similarly, treating indigenous
groups justly by granting them rights of self-governance not only enhances their capacity to
determine their own development but also promotes intrastate stability and the sustainability of
the ecosystems they inhabit. On the other hand, injustice towards animals, for example, is
maladaptive for both animals and humans insofar as disregarding their interests is likely to lead
to habitat destruction, inefficient use of farmland for raising cattle, and use of toxic chemicals
that threaten biodiversity. In short, implementing the principles of planetary ethics promotes the
collective survival of beings with moral status. This view conforms to the hypothesis proposed
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by astrophysicist Chaisson, according to which there is a cosmic law of natural selection, which
states that the survival of the technological civilizations that have likely evolved throughout the
universe depends on their implementing a planetary ethic that supports the existence and
evolution of life within the constraints imposed by their own biosphere.49
In addition to elucidating the relationship between moral consciousness and some of our
most advanced physical and behavioral sciences, planetary ethics should engender a profound
sense of moral responsibility to actively engage in social justice issues. One of the weaknesses of
theories of secular ethics is that they do not match the moral passions generated by religion-
based ethical traditions. But if we truly understand ourselves as existing at the end of a long,
strenuous, and majestic evolutionary process that has thus far culminated in a moral
consciousness striving to promote the flourishing of life forms on our biosphere, we cannot but
recognize that we bear a profound responsibility to safeguard those embodiments of value and
goodness that nature has generated. Unless we act in a morally responsible way, we do not
deserve to be considered as the beings that have the highest level of moral status. Planetary
ethics is the most expansive and lucid articulation of the moral consciousness that has evolved on
earth, i.e., it is the morality of the earth made explicit. As the species that is the most self-
consciously moral, human beings have inherited the responsibility to implement their moral
sensibilities in the most embracing way possible and thus support the survival and flowering of
humanity and other forms of life on our embattled planet. It is only in this way that we can
achieve our full evolutionary potential.
1 Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).2 Ibid., p. 243.3 Marc Bekoff and Margaret Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 1-12.4 Edwin J. C. Van Leeuwen, Katherine A. Cronin, Sebastian Schütte, Josep Call, and Daniel B. M. Haun, “Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Flexibly Adjust Their Behaviour in Order to Maximize Payoffs, Not to Conform to Majorities,” PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (11): e80945 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0080945 and Kacelnik, A., Chappell, J., Weir, A.A.S., & Kenward, B. “Cognitive adaptations for tool-related behavior in New Caledonian Crows,” in Comparative Cognition: experimental explorations of animal intelligence eds. Wasserman, E.A., & Zentall, T.R. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 515-528.5 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).6 “Animal Sentience,” accessed 9/21/2015, https://www.voiceless.org.au/the-issues/animal-sentience7 Paul F. Taylor, Respect for Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 45 and p. 121.8 Anthony Trewavas, Plant Behavior and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).9 Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany, Volume 92, Issue 1, pp.1-20.10 P.J. Aphalo and C.L. Ballare, “On the Information-Acquiring Systems in Plant-Plant Interactions,” Functional Ecology, Vol. 9, No.1, 1995: 5-14. 11 David Biello, “When it Comes to Photosynthesis, Plants Perform Quantum Computation,” Scientific American, April 2007.12 This classificatory scheme for assigning moral status to human and animals is similar to that proposed by Jon Wetlesen in “The Moral Status of Beings Who are Not Persons: A Casuistic Argument,” Environmental Values Vol. 8, No.3 (1999): 287-232. Nancy Hancock discusses Wetlesen’s article in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (2002): 1-12.
13See, for example, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).14 We should note that theories of political authority or legitimacy are similarly flawed to the extent that they neglect historical processes of state formation. The focus of most of these theories is on the internal legitimacy of states, to the neglect of the equally important issue of their external legitimacy. I would contend that ultimately the political authority of the state cannot be legitimized without considering the historical processes of its formation. 15 My account of the set of rights to which compatriots are entitled (particularly the first three categories of rights) is inspired by the account provided in Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 16 Henry Shue, Basic Rights 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. 17 Later I discuss the limitations that the rights of animals in wild animal communities to access their own natural resources impose on human access to the earth’s resources. 18 I do not have the space here to articulate the reasons why it is reasonable to recognize, at least conditionally, border controls as part of the territorial powers of states. For a discussion of these reasons, see Jorge Valadez, “Is Immigration a Human Right?” Cosmopolitanism in Context: Perspectives from international law and political theory, Roland Pierik and Wouter Werner, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 19 See Hillel Steiner, “Just Taxation and International Redistribution”, Global Justice, ed. I. Shapiro and L. Brilmayer, NOMOS XXXIX, (1999): 171-191.20 Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1994):195-224, p. 200.21 Tim Hayward, “Thomas Pogge’s Global Resources Dividend: a critique and an alternative,” Journal of Moral Philosophy Vol. 2.3: 317-332, p. 324.
22 Ibid., pp. 330. 23 See, for example, Gordon Walker, Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 24Stiglitz and Charlton discuss the conditions needed for fair economic global cooperation in Stiglitz, J. and Charlton, A. Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 25 Michel Heiner, “Towards Fair Terms of Economic Cooperation,” in Sovereign Justice: Global Justice in a World of Nations, Diogo Aurelio, Gabriele de Angelis, Regina Queiros, eds. (Berlin: De Gruyter Publ., 2010), p. 223.26 Ibid., p. 87.27 Ibid., p. 95.28 Jorge Valadez, “Is Immigration a Human Right?” Cosmopolitanism in Context: Perspectives from international law and political theory, Roland Pierik and Wouter Werner, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) and “Migration, Self-Determination, and Global Justice: Towards a Normative Holistic Theory of Migration,” Journal of International Political Theory, Vol. 8.1-2: 135-146.29 Ibid. p. 235.30 See, for example, J.M. Kirigia, A.R. Gbary, L.K. Muthuri, J. Nyoni, A. Seddoh, "The Cost of Health Professionals' Brain Drain in Kenya," BMC Health Service Research 6, no. 89 (2006) and D. Kapur & J. McHale, “Should a cosmopolitan worry about the ‘brain drain’?” Ethics and International Affairs, 20.3: 305-20.31 “Migrants from developing countries sent home $414 billion in earnings in 2013,” World Bank, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/02/ Migrants-from-developing-countries-to-send-home-414-billion-in-earnings-in-201332 “Aid in Developing Countries Rebounds in 2013 to reach an all-time high,” OECD, accessed December 4, 2014, http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/aid-to-developing-countries-rebounds-in-2013-to-reach-an-all-time-high.htm33 D. Kapur & J. McHale, “Should a cosmopolitan worry about the ‘brain drain’?” Ethics and International Affairs, 20.3: 305-20, p. 319. Of course, some migrants would become permanent members of the receiving countries, while others would migrate for reasons other than to access labor markets in the developed world.34 Richard W. Miller, Globalizing Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 159-161.35 For discussions of the absence of public accountability in global governance, see David Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi, Global Governance and Public Accountability (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), particularly chapters 3,5, and 11. 36 Jorge M. Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multicultural Societies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).37 Of course, there is the possibility that their existence could be so wretched that it would be worse than their nonexistence, but this still leaves a wide range of possible future scenarios in which their lives are worth living despite our having harmed the environment in serious ways. 38 Lukas H. Meyer, “Past and Future. The Case for a Threshold Conception of Harm”, in Rights, Culture, and the Law. Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, Thomas W. Pogge, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143-59.39 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 40 Ibid., pp. 210-251. 41 Ibid., pp. 156-209.42 “Habitat Destruction,” World Animal Foundation, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www. worldanimalfoundation.net /f/HabitatDestruction.pdf43 This is obviously a politically difficult objective to implement. But regardless of the problems with achieving its realization, it is nevertheless important to emphasize the importance of human
population reduction for creating a just global order that takes seriously the welfare of nonhuman animals. 44 See, for example, Stuart Kaufmann, The Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Eric J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001), Ilya Prigogine, Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes (New York: Wiley Publ., 1061).45 Eric J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 4.46 For an overview of the strategies that nature uses to develop complex structures, see John H. Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus Books, 1995). 47 Holmes Rolston, III, “Care on Earth: generating informed care,” Information and the Nature of Reality, Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 203-245.48 Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012).49 Eric J. Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001).