Animal Ethics and Species Justice: Our Direct Justice Obligations Towards Invertebrates

This chapter considers our moral and justice obligations to non-human animals. The most prominent approaches to animal ethics are reviewed with a focus on their implications for invertebrate species. It is argued that both consequentialist and deontological approaches to animal ethics largely converge on the view that our relations to other species need to be radically reformed to reduce the pain, suffering, and death that we inflict upon them. This conclusion can be readily extended to sentient invertebrates as well. The literature on species justice extends work in animal ethics to consider the obligations we have to ensure that laws, political institutions, and social structures are reformed in order to better meet our moral obligations to non-human animals. Key theories of species justice—Donaldson and Kymlicka’s (Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. Oxford University Press, 2011) Zoopolis, and Nussbaum’s (2023) capability approach—are reviewed, with a particular focus on their implications for invertebrates. The chapter also considers welfarist approaches to our treatment of non-human animals. The chapter concludes with a detailed account of what a ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ species justice theory could look like, thus creating a framework to more closely examine our relations to invertebrate species in the following chapters.