Issues of egalitarianism, sustainable agriculture, ecology, and biomedical research all meet at the nexus of animal welfare concerns. Therefore, with regard to global justice, issues of animal rights and animal welfare are of growing magnitude. The fact that animal welfare overlaps broadly with many other issues of consequence for global justice should be of no surprise given human culture’s longstanding ties to, and preoccupation with, nonhuman animals. Traditionally, the human relationship to nonhuman animals has been informed by religious doctrine, and typically, with some exceptions, religious milieus have endorsed a human-oriented hierarchy with regard to nonhuman animals. Philosophy, especially in the West, has tended to enforce such systems. Aristotle argued that animals lack rational souls and therefore are outside of the sphere of justice. Rene Descartes famously likened nonhuman animals on the whole to sophisticated automata. Immanuel Kant believed that human beings ought to...
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Torcello, L. (2011). Animal Rights. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_684
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