Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation

Abstract

Carol Gilligan bas described justice and caring as two distinct moral frameworks or orientations to ethical concerns.(Gilligan 1982) The justice framework is characterized by abstraction, the application of general rules ofconduct, an emphasis on restraining aggression, and a concern for consistency and the fair resolution of conflicting claims and interests.The caring framework, on the other hand, is characterized by its focus on the concrete and particular, its emphasis on the maintenance and extension of connection, and by its concern for responsiveness and the satisfaction of needs.Animal liberation is often framed as a justice issue, though, I will suggest, it may more appropriately be understood in terms of caring.By "animal liberation" I mean opposition to institutions of animal exploitation such as vivisection, hunting, and animal farming.Two prominent philosophical defenders of animal liberation are Tom Regan and Peter Singer.Both work exclusively within the justice framework, presenting animal liberation as a matter of consistency and fair treatment, rather than in terms of responsiveness and the satisfaction of needs.We can start to see how the justice approach is ill-suited for animal liberation by considering the arguments of Regan and Singer.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.