John Rawls Theory Of Justice To Animals

When talking about justice, it becomes problematic to define the concepts and understand who should be the receiver and in what way they should receive justice. Nevertheless, for humans, there is always someone being an advocate for their rights, at least the person interested in a government or a society respecting their own human rights. For animals it is another story since animals do not have the option of communicating and fighting for their rights alone, people need to be the advocates of this group. In recent times, the justice that needs to be given towards animals has become an ardent issue with different opinions in the matter. These opinions, however, need a basic theory of justice to base their arguments and legitimize them. Justice

What is justice about, are animals moral beings, are they deserving of justice? And how should justice to animals be applied? John Rawls argues that whereas only moral agents are entitled to justice, animals by lacking this characteristic are excluded; but this does not mean that we have no moral duties to animals. He prioritizes justice over other values, especially over morality. For him as for other liberal thinkers, the moral status is excluded for these recipients of justice. They argue that the pluralism in a society would have different attitudes towards the treatment of animals so the state should resist interfering with different conceptions of the good . He does not reject the humanitarian side; the importance of human duties towards animals, but it is different to justice. Justice is a matter for legal state enforcement; in this sense we do need to regard animal rights in this language of justice and not only in terms of morality because it has no legal standing and we do need animal rights to have legal significance to protect them from cruelty ; in this sense we have to regard animals with morality and justice

The development of theories could enable animals to be included as recipients of justice. But, even if they were moral agents, it does not rule out the protection to animals from cruel treatment. What counts as cruel treatment is when the use of animals stops being beneficial to humans. The structure of domination by systematic oppression is borderline exploitation and marginalization when animals are killed in the name of human culture or are precisely raised for food. There should be an inclusion of animals in the scope of justice because we share the physical world. They should be encompassed in the moral rules, values, and concerns about fairness that apply to human beings . It is not fatal to the theory of animal rights if we adopt this more inclusive principle because it does not exclude rights grounded in interests that allow for the inclusion of