I hold the belief that our actions must take into consideration the needs and well-being of others and this includes animals and plants. I believe this because I experience kinship between all living things.
We have a moral obligation to pursue justice because justice is about recognizing kinship. In the human world we have created institutions, like courts, which act as mediators for our claims. Often we view justice as a contractual relationship whereby consent and contract are the necessary requisites to action. Law is a contract in the sense that we enter into a mutual agreement with our fellow citizens not to do harm to one another or to recognize that each one of us is the bearer of rights. This is by no means a complete account of justice, in fact I have long been troubled by the proprietary nature of liberal justice, but still it is a framework for recognizing that some form of consensual structure must exist in human interactions.
When we are talking about plants and animals, there is no basis for a consensual structure of justice. Instead, justice must take the form of limitation. I argue that justice, in our interaction with non-human life forms, entails recognition of the right of the animal or plant to exist. This right is not contractual but, I believe, self-evident. It is evident in the very presence of that plant or animal as another being on Earth. The will-to-life, the creative impulse that has created that living being demands recognition. Animal rights is a challenging question because a recognition of the right of animals to exist, for instance, often runs counter to the proprietary claims of individual human beings. For instance, how would I, as a court, balance the right of fish to live unmolested in the Athabasca River against the claims of Syncrude to land titles and drilling rights in the Athabasca Oil Sands? Or, better yet, does a fish have a right to live unmolested if people survive off of those fish?
Clearly there is no such thing as unmolested existence, especially not among the plant and animal kingdoms. Plants and animals compete for survival in a violent way. Human beings, on the contrary, often seek to mitigate this violence by appealing to reason, to conciliation, to the very notion of property as a means for mediating human interactions. How often do we hear that respect for property rights is the basis for democracy?
In my mind, human beings do not need to engage in the violence that is embedded in the struggle for survival in the natural world if we possess certain critical and reasoning faculties -not to mention the metaphysical notion of love- which enables us to recognize the impulse to life in other living beings. This is an important part of the human condition and it does separate us from non-human nature. Surely it can be argued that our ability to love justice and refrain from brutality is a recognition that we have moved beyond the hand-t0-mouth struggle which has governed human history since the first human beings appeared on Earth.
Nevertheless, our separation from non-human nature does not mean we are superior and I resist the notion that human beings are superior to the rest of creation because of our reasoning faculties. To me, this is a blanket generalization that all-too-often rests on the notion that “might makes right.” In other words, because we have superior force at our disposal we are superior. Now it could also be argued that our reason does set us apart, that our metaphysics, our religious impulse and our cultural achievements are what make our superiority self-evident. But again, I have to disagree.
The reason I say “No” is because this self-proclaimed superiority rests on a claim to judgment of other forms of life that we are not at liberty to make. Do we really believe in an order where the strong are always superior and should be free to exercise power with abandon? Or, do we really believe that all the myriad life on this planet should be disregarded or the victim of malign neglect because our pursuit of our own comfort or satisfaction must trump the need for other beings to not only survive, but to be free? Do we reject the idea that other beings have the right to be free?
I look at it this way: are human beings going to equate success and extraordinary achievement with technological progress, with material abundance and the illusion of total control of their environment, or is success something less material? Are we going to determine that our crowning achievements come from what we have made or from what we have not made?
This really is a fundamental question.
I believe that actual justice must move beyond the proprietary and the contractual into a realm of recognition of life itself as a sacred, vital and transcendent good on this Earth. Justice must serve the idea of the good. Human achievement actually occurs when we work in service of a just goodness. This can be achieved by recognizing our kinship with other beings. It can also be a basis for our jurisprudence.
A good and just order must also recognize economic justice among and between human beings. The prospect of starvation, of war and of entrenched poverty plagues many parts of the human world. Where human beings are suffering animals are made to suffer. Desperation leads to poor environmental policies that come from the frantic attempt for survival. A balanced world is one where people are not in desperation but where they are able to feel kinship because they are free. Human freedom must be sacred to each one of us and from this love of freedom we can love the freedom of all beings and seek to ensure that all beings remain free. We need an economics and a politics that is not narrow but is broadly and unconventionally informed by this knowledge.
I wrote on New Year’s Day that it is wrong to take from any living being the ability to survive and to face the vicissitude of Nature. When we do this we lose our humanity because we lose our sense of kinship with all life. I must say once more: all life is inter-related. That which affects one being affects all beings. Our pursuit of justice must begin with this realization and we must recognize that while suffering may be at the heart of the temporal world, our love of justice and our love for one another must guide our actions. After all, each living being is bound by the rapture of being alive. That rapture is love and it is something we all share.
Jeremy Nathan Marks
