ABSTRACT
In modern discussions about recognition, it is typically assumed that the notion applies to persons who are rational at least in some functional sense. This often excludes non-human animals from the scope of the notion of recognition. In Chapter 15, Miira Tuominen discusses ancient and late ancient conceptions of justice from the perspective of what in today’s discussion is known as the normative aspect of recognition. In contemporary debate, it is usually assumed that mutual recognition brings along the requirements of justice. With respect to the converse of this claim, however, some scholars have argued that our intuitions concerning recognition contain opposing elements, some of which require mutuality, whereas others focus on the ‘adequate regard’ of those normative features that some creatures or even things have in virtue of which they require justice, although there no mutuality can be achieved. Tuominen explores ancient and late ancient debates on justice from the perspective of these intuitions. She argues that we can detect two rather different perspectives to justice that bear noteworthy resemblances to the two aspects just distinguished: while Aristotle’s notion of justice with his arguments against some of the characteristics of justice as it gets discussed in Plato’s Republic incorporates some of the mutuality intuitions, there is another, less well-known ancient debate about justice that rather focuses on the intuitions of adequate regard and the relevant normative features that entail requirements of justice for us on the treatment of other creatures. Such a discussion can be found in Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals, in which he argues against the Stoics that their conception of justice is untenable because it, due to a kind of collective self-love, overlooks the relevant normative features in other animals that they are eager to find in human beings.
