A New Theory of Justice

I managed to catch up with “wild law” pioneer Cormac Cullinan at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights, after his speech on the rights of nature. When I asked him about the rights of non-human animals, he presented me with an interesting extension of John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice.” Cullinan asked me to imagine that I had the chance to design the world before I was born into it. The catch was this: that I could be born as any creature—a white baby in New York, a black baby in sub-Saharan Africa, a polar bear in the Arctic, a pig on a factory farm, an elephant in a zoo. What would the world look like if you knew that you could be born a chicken, only to live for 39 days in a dark shed with 50,000 other chickens and no access to the outdoors, then be hung upside down with your throat slit, and scalded alive in boiling water? If this were the case, then maybe, just maybe, we would treat other animals more fairly.