“While duties of corrective justice in the case of harms to human beings are widely accepted, there is almost non-existing discussion on whether these duties should be extended to non-human animals, even though animals are also wronged by our actions, and sometimes even to a greater extent. Very few maintain that we owe nothing to non-human animals, especially to those in need. Many agree that we have at least some duties of justice to non-human animals, for example, of distributive justice (based on priority (see Regan, 1984; Holtug, 2007), equality (see Horta, 2016; Persson and Vallentyne, 2005), or sufficiency (Crisp, 2003). In this paper I explore how corrective justice can be extended to non-human animals. The paper investigates why certain normative attitudes are not necessary in order to count as a claimant of corrective justice. I suggest which responses can count as fitting when it comes to discharging duties of corrective justice to non-human animals. I also discuss who should count as a candidate for having claims of corrective justice, that is, to whom we owe duties of corrective justice (ie ecosystems, species, individual non-human animals, or rather, groups of non-human animals). Finally, I raise concern about the difficulty of determining a baseline for the correction of wrongs to nonhuman animals that live in the wild, given that their original situation is far from idyllic. This has important implications in deciding how to correct wrongs like those of climate change …”
Julia Mosquera, Climate Change, Corrective Justice, and Non-Human Animals in Joe Roussos and Paul Bowman (eds), Studies on Climate Ethics and Future Generations volume 4 (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, 2021) 121.
First posted 2022-01-22 08:49:30
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