"Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case"
About this Quote
Rawls isn’t trying to turn readers into animal-rights absolutists here; he’s drawing a boundary around what a liberal society owes even to those who can’t bargain, vote, or demand reasons in return. The phrasing is doing quiet but strategic work. “Certainly” signals he’s treating this as moral common ground, not a controversial add-on. He’s staking a claim that compassion toward animals is not sentimental garnish but a duty any serious ethical framework must absorb.
The subtext is a repair job. Rawls is famous for centering justice on “persons” with capacities for reason and a sense of justice, which has long invited the critique: what about beings outside that club - animals, infants, the severely cognitively disabled? By foregrounding “pleasure and pain” and “forms of life,” he borrows the most basic, hard-to-dodge currency of moral considerability: sentience. He doesn’t argue that animals have rights identical to humans; he argues their vulnerability creates obligations that look like humane restraint, not political equality.
Context matters: late-20th-century moral philosophy was being reshaped by animal ethics (Singer’s utilitarian challenge, Regan’s rights-based view), while environmental alarms made “destruction of a whole species” feel less like an abstraction and more like an indictment. Rawls’s move is characteristically liberal: keep the grand architecture of justice for citizens, but insist that decent institutions and decent people must still be bound by compassion where power is one-sided. It’s a minimal premise with maximal implications for how we eat, experiment, conserve, and legislate.
The subtext is a repair job. Rawls is famous for centering justice on “persons” with capacities for reason and a sense of justice, which has long invited the critique: what about beings outside that club - animals, infants, the severely cognitively disabled? By foregrounding “pleasure and pain” and “forms of life,” he borrows the most basic, hard-to-dodge currency of moral considerability: sentience. He doesn’t argue that animals have rights identical to humans; he argues their vulnerability creates obligations that look like humane restraint, not political equality.
Context matters: late-20th-century moral philosophy was being reshaped by animal ethics (Singer’s utilitarian challenge, Regan’s rights-based view), while environmental alarms made “destruction of a whole species” feel less like an abstraction and more like an indictment. Rawls’s move is characteristically liberal: keep the grand architecture of justice for citizens, but insist that decent institutions and decent people must still be bound by compassion where power is one-sided. It’s a minimal premise with maximal implications for how we eat, experiment, conserve, and legislate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
