Reframing Social Justice

Potentially his theory could be extended to address situations of vulnerable and threatened species. Though Rawls addresses the issue of justice for future generations, there are inadequacies in Rawls’ theory. It is based on establishing rights, essentially within a society following a western model of democracy. A rights-based approach to eco-justice is limited, because it emphasises the individual too much and lacks the concept of collective or common ownership necessary for eco-justice.

Some of Rawls’ critics argue that we must go beyond a rights-based approach to justice, to one fundamentally built on an ethic of care and community. Moreover, there are situations where the inequalities of power are such that no appeal to rights will remedy the injustice. In criticising Rawls, Anne Primavesi calls for an approach to justice “which sees violations through the eyes of the powerless victims of development, of progress, of technical fixes; of those whose cultures have been ransacked and whose peoples, whether in Irian Jaya, Ogoniland or the cloud forests of Colombia, have been ruined”.

I agree. Eco-justice must be passionate and empathetic, emanating primarily from our capacity to care rather than being simply based on rationality. Like social justice, eco-justice requires the constant nourishment of love if it is be transformative in the face of inequalities of power.

Eco-justice is premised on an ecocentric understanding of the interconnectedness of all life on earth, which respects, values, loves and cares about all life. It therefore highlights the responsibility of human beings to promote the common good through right relating with all life forms. In exercising this responsibility eco-justice, as the new name for social justice, requires practices and policies which support sustainability and which respond, as a high priority, to the needs of the most disadvantaged and marginalised human and non-human beings.