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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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,

42

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,

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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

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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).