Abstract
On a prominent family of views about the justification of legitimate policy-making (public justification views), considerations about the rights and well-being of nonhuman animals can only play a derivative role at best. On these views, these considerations matter only if they can figure in the content of the public reasons that citizens can offer each other. This thesis I call the Indirect View. Some authors have argued that this constitutes a reason to reject the ideal of public justification, or at least to qualify it. It is unclear, however, whether public justification theorists will be persuaded by this. In this paper, I argue that they should. In order to do so, I focus on three justifications of the ideal of public justification that have been offered in the literature (justice, our reactive attitudes, and civic friendship), and contend that none of them supports the Indirect View. In some cases, this is because the value in question (e.g. justice) might indeed be extended to animals. In other cases, this is because there is often a trade-off between the values in play and considerations about the rights and well-being of animals in which the former do not always outweigh the latter.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
11 October 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02057-8
Notes
For the purposes of this article, I assume only that at least some animals have interests that are robust enough, from a moral standpoint, to generate duties on our part. Not much hinges on the further question of whether those animals are, in addition, subjects of rights, or whether their interests matter as much as the equivalent interests of humans – if one believes such an equivalence is, indeed, possible. Although, throughout the text, I shall speak of “animal rights and well-being,” those who are skeptical about the idea of animal rights can feel free to focus just on well-being – as, once again, nothing crucial will depend on that. For some influential discussions of the moral status of animals, see Singer, 1975, Regan, 1983, Pluhar, 1995, DeGrazia 1996 and Cochrane, 2012.
Surely, public justification views are not the only accounts of legitimacy and justification available, but they are influential enough to deserve specific discussion.
I am thankful to one anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I mention this trend.
At least on its Rawlsian formulation, which applies only to constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice.
There is another possibility. Some authors have suggested that public justification can be a workable and attractive idea, as long as considerations of animal rights and interests restrict what can possibly count as a public justification (Cf. Nussbaum, 2006; Cochrane, 2018, 104; Milburn, 2023, ch. 7). Although these authors want to retain the ideal of public justification in some form, they allow this ideal to be shaped and constrained directly by considerations about animal rights and interests. This is an interesting view, and perhaps the arguments defended in this paper can be seen as offering some support for it. Although these authors are, as a matter of fact, rejecting standard accounts of public justification, their view also seems to differ, on the one hand, from the two strategies mentioned. I am indebted to one anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to this possibility, and for the references.
This contrast is obviously a simplification, as one might be an animal advocate and a supporter of public justification.
Of course, this argument is not purely internal, as I shall also appeal to some judgments about the value and relevance of animal interests. These judgments, however, needn’t be highly controversial, as we shall see.
Raz (1998, 38) has claimed that “[r]egarding any justified principle, people of normal capacities are in principle able to understand that it is justified.” On some versions of moral realism, though, there might be reasons (understood as facts and considerations counting for or against an evaluative or normative judgment) that humans cannot even in principle access, given the kinds of creatures that we are.
It is, of course, not entirely clear whether the second account is purely impersonal or correctness-based, as it still makes reference to what rational beings might in principle endorse. Because of this ambiguity, I have instead preferred to introduce the three accounts without attaching them to any of the labels prominent in the literature.
Of course, they disagree about many other things too.
Rawls ([1971] 1999, 512), for instance, famously claimed that “[t]he capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.” Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
More generally, Quong (2012, 55) explicitly rejects that judgments about political legitimacy are all things considered judgments for which considerations of public justification provide merely pro tanto reasons, and Rainer Forst ([2007] 2012, 7–8) argues that “justice [i.e. the ideal of public justification] is the first and overriding virtue in political contexts” [My emphasis].
Although developing such a pluralist account would require a separate paper, it can nonetheless be useful to offer a brief sketch of some of the forms it might take. Such an account can take at least three forms. A weak pluralist account might claim, first, that although both considerations of public justification and of animal rights/interests can provide non-derivative reasons for or against the justification of political decisions, in cases of conflict, the former always trumps the latter (Direct Impact with lexical priority for public justification). A moderate pluralist account would claim, in turn, that both considerations of public justification and animal rights/interests can count non-derivatively, and that, in cases of conflict, the latter might outweigh the former only when animals are wronged in a particularly serious way (Direct Impact with weak priority for public justification). Finally, a strong pluralist account might state that both kinds of considerations can count non-derivatively, and that, in cases of conflict, none of the two has clear priority over the other (Direct Impact with roughly equal weight). If the arguments offered in this paper are sound, the weak pluralist account is probably too weak – as I try to offer examples in which considerations of animal rights/interests can plausibly outweigh considerations of public justification, at least under some circumstances. I thank an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to say more about this.
Later in the section, this conception of justice will be subjected to closer scrutiny (in particular, in relation to whether it necessarily excludes animals).
Thus, for Rawls, possession of the two moral powers constitutes a “range property,” which entitles those who possess it to the sufficient degree to the same protections, regardless of how much those individuals differ in the degree to which they instantiate the relevant property (above the threshold). Cf. Rawls [1971], (1999), 444.
Other authors, of course, have argued that animals should be considered recipients of justice regardless of whether that is compatible with cooperation-centered accounts (Cf. Garner, 2013; Berkey, 2015; Plunkett, 2016; Healey and Pepper 2021). Thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers for some useful comments here.
See Taylor Smith, (2020).
As I am inclined to accept that coercing others who are, ex hypothesi, epistemically justified in believing something (or, at the very least, possess an excuse for doing so) wrongs them to some degree, I am not too keen on this second model, but I have mentioned it anyway for the sake of completeness.
Rawls (2001, 6) for instance, explicitly distinguishes “merely socially coordinated activity” from “social cooperation,” which, in his view, requires “publicly recognized rules and procedures which those cooperating accept as appropriate to regulate their conduct.” Only the latter, says Rawls, constitutes the basis of justice. Similarly, Forst ([2007] 2012, 280 n. 122) contends that, although animals are not moral agents, they should not be “treated “inhumanely,” or independently of normative criteria.”
Granted, one can restrict the scope of a theory of justice so that it already begins from within a liberal understanding of justice as a fair scheme of cooperation between citizens as free and equals (Quong, 2011, Ch. 5). This strategy, however, will seem quite unsatisfactory for those who think that the question of which conception of justice best realizes justice’s distinctive function is both a sensible and highly important one.
By a presumption against coercion, I mean, quite minimally, that coercion is, by default, in need of justification, and that the justificatory threshold is substantive. This seems shared by almost, if not all, public justification theorists (Vallier, 2022), and does not entail the more controversial claim that coercion is uniquely in need of justification (for criticism of this claim, see Lister, 2013, Bird, 2014, van Schoelandt, 2015 and Zuolo, 2020, 101–102). I thank an anonymous reviewer for some useful comments on this.
I say “at the most fundamental level”, because they might admit rules of thumb assigning presumptive (dis)value to certain actions if following these rules maximizes aggregate welfare in the long run.
Animals are agents to the extent that they are goal-oriented organisms whose actions can be evaluated according to certain criteria of practical rationality (e.g. coherence between ends and means), and to the extent that they are intentional creatures capable of reliably representing at least some features of their environment, and of updating and revising those representational states in the light of new evidence. See, for discussion, Rowlands (2019), Paez, (2021), 9–12, and the essays in Hurley and Nudds 2006
In this respect, this account differs from the others previously discussed. Importantly, though, the fact that civic friendship is pro tanto valuable does not imply that it is instrumentally valuable, as it is arguably the case with others values, such as stability (Cf. Weithman, 2010). I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
For exemple, in a 2015 Gallup Poll conducted in the US 94% of respondents supported granting nonhuman animals legal protections, with 32% of them claiming that those protections should be analogous to those received by humans (Riffkin, 2015).
This last category comprises “a set of (unreflected) attitudes” about animals that are socially prevalent (Zuolo, 2020, 168–173). They include, for instance, a disposition to care about animals in proportion to how charismatic they seem to us, or a tendency to adjust our moral beliefs about animals in response to cognitive dissonance (i.e. we seem more willing to deny animals’ consciousness when the connection between animal suffering and animal food consumption is made explicit).
This might thus be a case of nested inconclusiveness, which occurs “when a set of principles is inconclusively justified at the neutral level and receives broad but not full support by the reasons internal to the diverse views, while other principles are rebutted at the diverse levels [of justification]” (Zuolo, 2020, 220). Nested inconclusiveness, Zuolo argues, must be settled democratically. Although a defender of the Direct Impact View needn’t deny that, all things considered, that is the legitimate thing to do, she will nonetheless insist that, in adjudicating this, considerations of animal rights and interests can play a non-derivative role.
References
Badiola, C. B. (2018). Science as public reason: A restatement. Res Publica, 24, 415–432.
Barnhill, Anne, & Bonotti, Matteo. (2022). Healthy eating policy and political philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Basl, John, & Schouten, Gina. (2018). Can we use social policy to enhance compliance with moral obligations to animals? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 21, 629–647.
Berkey, B. (2015). Prospects for an inclusive theory of justice: The case of non-human animals. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 34(5), 679–695.
Bird, C. (2014). Coercion and public justification. Politics Philosophy and Economics, 13(3), 189–214.
Boettcher, J. W. (2007). Respect, recognition, and public reason. Social Theory and Practice, 33(2), 223–249.
Boettcher, J. W. (2012). The moral status of public reason. Journal of Political Philosophy, 20(2), 156–177.
Carruthers, P. (1992). The animals issue: Moral theory in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Christensen, D. (2009). Disagreement as evidence: The epistemology of controversy. Philosophy Compass, 4/5, 756–767.
Cochrane, A. (2012). Animal rights without liberation: Applied ethics and human obligations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cochrane, A. (2018). Sentientist politics: A theory of global inter-species justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cochrane, A., Garner, R., & S. O'Sullivan (2018). Animal ethics and the political. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 21(2), 261–277.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2009). Distributive justice and co-operation in a world of humans and non-humans: A contractarian argument for drawing non-humans into the sphere of justice. Res Publica, 15(1), 67–84.
Cohen, J. (2008). Truth and public reason. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 37(1), 2–42.
D’Agostino, F. (1996). Free public reason: Making it up as we go. New York: Oxford University Press.
DeGrazia, D. (1996). Taking animals seriously: Mental life and moral status. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donaldson, S, and W. Kymlicka. (2011). Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ebels-Duggan, K. (2010). The beginning of community: Politics in the face of disagreement. The Philosophical Quarterly, 60(238), 50–71.
Eberle, C. J. (2002). Religious conviction in liberal politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enoch, D. (2015). Against public reason. In D. Sobel, P. Vallentyne, & S. Wall (Eds.), Oxford studies in political philosophy, volume 1 (pp. 112–144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Estlund, D. (2008). Democratic authority: A philosophical framework. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Flanders, C. (2014). Public reason and animal rights. In M. Wissenburg & D. Schlosberg (Eds.), Political animals and animal politics (pp. 44–57). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Forst, R. (2012). The right to justification: Elements of a constructivist theory of justice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Garner, R. (2003). Animals, politics and justice: Rawlsian liberalism and the plight of non-humans. Environmental Politics, 12(2), 3–22.
Garner, R. (2013). A theory of justice for animals: Animal rights in a nonideal world. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gaus, G. (2011). The order of public reason: A theory of freedom and morality in a diverse and bounded world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gaus, G. (2014). The good, the bad, and the ugly: Three agent-type challenges to the order of public reason. Philosophical Studies, 170, 563–577.
Gradidge, S., Zawisza, M., Harvey, A. J., Daragh, T., & McDermott. (2021). A structured literature review of the meat paradox. Social Psychological Bulletin, 16(3), e5953.
Habermas, J. (1995). Reconciliation through the public use of reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s political liberalism. Journal of Philosophy, 92(3), 109–131.
Healey, R., Angie Pepper. (2021). Interspecies justice: Agency, self-determination, and assent. Philosophical Studies, 178, 1223–1243.
Hurley, S., and M. Nudds. (2006). Rational animals?. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. [1874-1875] 1997. Moral philosophy: Collin’s lecture notes, in Heath Peter and Jerome B. Schneewind (eds.).The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant. Lectures on ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kappel, K. (2021). Science as public reason and the controversiality objection. Res Publica, 27, 619–639.
Larmore, C. (1999). The moral basis of political liberalism. Journal of Philosophy, 96(12), 599–625.
Leland, R. J. (2019). Civic friendship, public reason. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 47(1), 72–103.
Lister, A. (2013). Public reason and political community. London: Bloomsbury.
Lomasky, L. (2013). It is wrong to eat animals. Social Philosophy and Policy, 30(1–2), 177–200.
Milburn, J. (2023). Food, justice, and animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mund, J. (2023). Contingent existence, worthwhile lives, and humane animal slaughter. Social Theory and Practice. Online first.
Nagel, T. (1987). Moral conflict and political legitimacy. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16(3), 215–240.
Nielsen, M. E. J., & Hauge-Helgestad, A. (2022). Come as you are? Public reason and climate change. Res Publica, 28(1), 17–32.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2006). Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species membership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paez, E. (2021). A republic for all sentients: Social freedom without free will. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Online version.
Pepper, A. (2017). Political liberalism, human cultures, and nonhuman lives, in Cordeiro-Rodrigues, Luís and Les Mitchell (eds.). Animals, race, and multiculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 35–59.
Pluhar, E. B. (1995). Beyond prejudice: The moral significance of human and nonhuman animals. Durham: Duke University Press.
Plunkett, D. (2016). Justice, non-human animals, and the methodology of political philosophy. Jurisprudence, 7(1), 1–29.
Quong, J. (2011). Liberalism without perfection. New York: Oxford University Press.
Quong, J. (2012). Liberalism without perfection: Replies to Gaus, Colburn, Chan, and Bocchiola. Philosophy and Public Issues, 2(1), 51–79.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism (1996th ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice [Revised edition]. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement (ed. Erin Kelly). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raz, J. (1998). Disagreement in politics. American Journal of Jurisprudence, 43(1), 25–52.
Regan, T. (1983). The case for animal rights. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Riffkin, R. (2015). In U.S., more say animals should have same rights as people. Gallup. (Last accessed: August 4, 2022).
Roberts-Cady, S. (2020). Extending Rawlsian justice to nonhuman animals. In J. Mandle & S. Roberts-Cady (Eds.), John Rawls: Debating the major questions (pp. 273–284). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rowlands, M. (1997). Contractarianism and animal rights. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 14(3), 235–247.
Rowlands, M. (2019). Can animals be persons? New York: Oxford University Press.
Singer, P. (1975). Animal liberation. New York: Harper Collins.
Smith, K. (2012). Governing animals: Animal welfare and the liberal state. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stephen, L. (1896). Social rights and duties (Vol. 1). London: S. Sonnenschein.
Strawson, P. F. (2008). Freedom and resentment. Freedom and resentment and other essays (pp. 1–28). New York: Routledge.
Taylor Smith, P. (2020). Rawls and animals: A defense. In J. Mandle & S. Roberts-Cady (Eds.), John Rawls: Debating the major questions (pp. 285–299). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Valentini, L. (2014). Canine justice: An associative account. Political Studies, 62(1), 37–52.
Vallier, K. (2019). Must politics be war? Restoring our trust in the open society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vallier, K. (2022). Public justification, in Zalta, Edward N. and Uri Nodelman (eds.). The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter edition). (Last accessed: 20 April, 2023).
Van Schoelandt, C. (2015). Justification, coercion, and the place of public reason. Philosophical Studies, 172, 1031–1050.
VanDeVeer, D. (1979). Of beasts, persons, and the original position. The Monist, 62(3), 68–377.
Wall, S. (2002). Is public justification self-defeating? American Philosophical Quarterly, 39(4), 385–394.
Weithman, P. (2010). Why political liberalism? On John Rawls’ political turn. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wendt, F. (2016). Compromise, peace and public justification: Political morality beyond Justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Zuolo, F. (2020). Animals, political liberalism and public reason. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Acknowledgement
I am thankful, for their comments and useful discussion, to Gonzalo Fernández Codina, Rubén Marciel and Eze Paez, and the participants at the University of Basel's Colloquium on Animal Ethics. Two anonymous reviewers for this journal spotted some inacuracies, made some valuable suggestions, and enhanced the paper.
Funding
My research has been made possible by a FPU Grant provided by the Spanish Ministry of Universities (Grant number: FP17/02300) and a postdoctoral fellowship within the project “Present Democracy for Future Generations” funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/FER-FIL/6088/2020). I have also benefited from the research project “Razón Pública Global: Derechos Humanos, Legitimidad Democrática y Cambio Demográfico” (PID2020-115041GB-100) funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
No conflict of interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Magaña, P. Animals in the order of public reason. Philos Stud 180, 3031–3056 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02026-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02026-1