Ecological and Environmental Justice: Our Indirect Justice Obligations Towards Invertebrates

In this chapter I explore the way that human-invertebrate interactions have indirect implications for environmental and ecological justice. The domain of environmental justice focuses on how the benefits and burdens of the environment are distributed among humans. Harm to invertebrates can result in a range of negative impacts on humans, with harms often unevenly experienced among human populations. Ecological justice focuses, broadly, on harms to the environment. Although there are well-known conceptual challenges in grounding our moral obligations towards entities like species and ecosystems, it is clear that human-invertebrate interactions can have significant effects on the viability of individual species and the functioning and integrity of ecosystems. Ultimately, evaluating the nature of human-invertebrate interactions will involve trade-offs among different components of justice and this chapter concludes with a pluralistic approach to decision-making that takes into account the full range of potentially impacted entities (individual invertebrates, humans, other species, and ecosystems) while prioritising the well-being and flourishing of sentient organisms, consistent with the approach to species justice developed in Chapter 6 .