ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a very broad question that arises: is the vocabulary of justice an appropriate one for addressing issues about the proper treatment of animals, non-sentient life and indeed non-living constituents of the environment, such as mountains? Are the wrongs or evils currently done to battery chickens, whales and, perhaps, forests to be conceived as examples of injustice and to be condemned on that ground? It explores the 'mainstream' approach in 'non-human' ethics: for certainly this approach has come to dominate thinking about the treatment of animals and it has at least loomed large in wider debates about environmental concern. Only if the differences between the human and the non-human were relevant to moral concern, would it be consistent and rational to limit it to humans. The former, for example, are construed as proposing some one or two differences between humans and animals - such as the capacity for speech - as justification for differential moral treatment.
