Distributive Justice and Animal Welfare

Besides the focus on the various approaches developed until now within animal ethics, perhaps it would be interesting to consider also what ethical theories have ruled out any moral concern for the interests of non-human beings. This article aims to rise some questions about the exclusion of (sentient) animals in the philosophical debates on distributive justice. The introduction briefly provides an overview on the current debate on distributive justice. The author focuses on those theories that adopt welfare as the currency of distribution (so-called “welfare ethics”), underlining how there seem to be a contradiction between the theory of value they rely on and their approach, exclusively focused on humans. The essay analyses the main issues related to the inclusion of animals in welfare ethics, i.e. (a) the alleged incommensurability between human and animal welfare, and (b) the “problematic conclusion”. The paper sketches a hypothesis of research to solve the “inter-species wellbeing comparisons” issue by proposing a model based on species-typical potentialities. Then, it tries to address the problem of demandingness by suggesting a sympathy-based foundation of welfare ethics. The last section singles out the moral issue of laboratory animals as an appropriate field of application for a welfarist approach.