Premium
3 Rethinking Global Justice from the Perspective of All Living Nature and What Difference it Makes
Author(s) -
Sterba James P.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
american journal of economics and sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.199
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1536-7150
pISSN - 0002-9246
DOI - 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2007.00498.x
Subject(s) - economic justice , global justice , environmental ethics , argument (complex analysis) , sociology , perspective (graphical) , epistemology , law and economics , law , political science , philosophy , biology , biochemistry , artificial intelligence , computer science
A bstract . I begin this chapter with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving, and I answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account. I argue that the more adequate global justice that takes into account all living beings imposes some additional obligations on us that are absent from a less defensible human‐centered global justice, but not as many as one might initially think.