3 Rethinking global justice from the perspective of all living nature and what difference it makes

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2007 by James P. Sterba

(4.) Basic needs, if not satisfied, lead to significant lacks or deficiencies with respect to a standard of mental and physical well-being, Thus, a person's needs for food, shelter, medical care, protection, companionship, and self-development are, at least in part, needs of this sort. For a discussion of basic needs, see my How to Make People Just, 45-48.

(5.) See James P. Sterba, "Is There a Rationale for Punishment?" Philosophical Topics 18(1) (1990): 105-125.

(6.) By "the liberty of the rich to meet their luxury needs" I continue to mean the liberty of the rich not to be interfered with when using their surplus possessions for luxury purposes. Similarly, by "the liberty of the poor to meet their basic needs" I continue to mean the liberty of the poor not to be interfered with when taking what they require to meet their basic needs from the surplus possessions of the rich.

(7.) For the argument, see Justice for Here and Now, Ch. 3,

(8.) For the purposes of this paper, I will follow the convention of excluding humans from the denotation of "animals."

(9.) The direct analogy is to a lifeboat case in which you are trying to secure a lifeboat for one person from someone else who has an equal claim to it.

(10.) This is what I think presently holds with regard to the means for protecting endangered species in the Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal.

(11.) It is also possible to reformulate these principles in a more linguistically species-neutral way so that they do not make direct reference to the human species. See James P. Sterba, "A Biocentrist Fights Back," Environmental Ethics 20(4) (1998): 361-376.

(12.) James P. Sterba, "The Welfare Rights of Distant Peoples and Future Generations: Moral Side-Constraints on Social Policy," Social Theory and Practice 7(2) (1981): 99-124.

By JAMES P. STERBA *

* James P. Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at, and a Founding Faculty Fellow of, the Joan B, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published 24 books, most recently the award-winning Justice for Here and Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Three Challenges to Ethics: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). He is a past president of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, and the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (American Section).