Abstract
Social justice in animals is beginning to attract interest in a broad range of academic disciplines. Justice is an important area of study because it may help explain social dynamics among individuals living in tightly-knit groups, as well as social interactions among individuals who only occasionally meet. In this paper, we provide an overview of what is currently known about social justice in animals and offer an agenda for further research. We provide working definitions of key terms, outline some central research questions, and explore some of the challenges of studying social justice in animals, as well as the promise of the work we're proposing. Finally, we suggest why continued research into animal cognition and social behavior has significant ethical implications for our treatment of nonhuman animals.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The challenge of providing a narrower definition of justice is similar to that faced by researchers who have been interested in social play and dominance, both of which are important to studies of social justice. Over the course of about 30 years, as play was studied in diverse species, researchers came to better working definitions of this phenomenon, and these are continually being refined (see Bekoff & Byers, 1981, 1998; Burghardt, 2005; Fagen, 1981). “Dominance” still eludes precise definition (for example, see Bernstein, 1981 and Bekoff, 2012 and extensive comments).
One reviewer offered this perspective: “The sense of justice employed must not be so broad that any behavioral regularity that engenders expectations in members of a social group – expectations that arouse indignation when the regularities are flouted – counts as justice. For example following [Robert] Solomon (and cited in Wild Justice), suppose wolves have, following a kill, a set of expectations concerning whom gets to eat when. This, I think would be too broad to count as justice. The danger is that it makes the case for justice in animals vacuous. Would anyone doubt that there are patterns of behavior in social mammals whose flouting can engender hostile feelings? If this is all justice is, then surely the question of whether animals can exhibit justice would have been answered in the affirmative a long time ago.”
A second reviewer (Peter Corning) offered the following distinction between justice and fairness: “Justice would seem to refer to what an individual deserves, independently of others. Fairness, on the other hand, involves a judgment that is bound up with our relationships with others and very often has a distributive focus—how the benefits and costs are allocated in our social relationships. I define it as striking a balance or compromise between different, perhaps conflicting needs, interests and deserts.” This reviewer also proposes that we identify three distinct categories of fairness: equality, equity, and reciprocity. In our view, this nuanced vocabulary is exceedingly important. But these distinctions have developed within the human realm over millennia of careful study and work. It is too early to know whether these same distinctions are relevant to the study of animal behavior.
References
Allen, C., & Bekoff, M. (1997). Species of mind: The philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ayala, F. (2010). The difference of being human: Morality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Suppl 2), 9015–9022.
Bekoff, Marc. (1995). Play signals as punctuation: The structure of social play in canids. Behaviour, 132, 419–429.
Bekoff, M. (1996). Cognitive ethology, vigilance, information gathering, and representation: Who might know what and why? Behavioural Processes, 35, 225–237.
Bekoff, M. (2006). The public lives of animals: A troubled scientist, pissy baboons, angry elephants, and happy hounds. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, 115–131.
Bekoff, M. (2007). The emotional lives of animals: A leading scientist explores animal joy, sorrow, and empathy, and why they matter. Novato, CA: New World Library.
Bekoff, M. (2010). The animal manifesto: Six reasons for expanding our compassion footprint. Novato, CA: New World Library.
Bekoff, M. (2012). Social dominance is not a myth. Psychology Today. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201202/social-dominance-is-not-myth-wolves-dogs-and-other-animals.
Bekoff, M., & Byers, J. A. (1981). A critical reanalysis of the ontogeny and phylogeny of mammalian social and locomotor play: An ethological hornet’s nest. In K. Immelmann, G. Barlow, M. Main, & L. Petrinovich (Eds.), Behavioral development: The Bielefeld interdisciplinary project (pp. 296–337). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bekoff, M., & Byers, J. A. (Eds.). (1998). Animal play: Evolutionary, comparative and ecological perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bekoff, M., & Pierce, J. (2009). Wild justice: The moral lives of animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ben-Ami Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Science, 334, 1427–1430.
Bernstein, I. S. (1981). Dominance: The baby and the bathwater. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 4, 419–429.
Bräuer, J., & Hanus, D. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Brosnan, S. F. (2006). Nonhuman species’ reactions to inequity and their implications for fairness. Social Justice Research, 19(2), 153–185.
Brosnan, S. F., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2003). Monkeys reject equal pay. Nature, 425, 297–299.
Brosnan, S. F., Houser, D., Leimgruber, K., Xiao, E., Chen, T., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2010a). Competing demands of prosociality and equity in monkeys. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(4), 279–288.
Brosnan, S. F., Schiff, H., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2004). Tolerance for inequity may increase with social closeness in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 1560, 253–258.
Brosnan, S. F., Talbot, C., Ahlgren, M., Lambeth, S., & Shapiro, S. (2010). Mechanisms underlying responses to inequitable outcomes in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. Animal Behaviour. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2010.02.019.
Burghardt, G. (2005). The genesis of animal play: Testing the limits. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.
Chen, J., & Houser, D. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Christen, M., & Glock, H. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Churchland, P. (2011). Braintrust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Corning, P. (2011). The fair society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin.
Damasio, A. (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. New York: Harcourt.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, M. S. (2004). Using behaviour to assess animal welfare. Animal Welfare, 13, 51–57.
Fagen, R. (1981). Animal play behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gazzaniga, M. (2005). The ethical brain. New York: Dana Press.
Greene, J., & Haidt, J. (2002). How (and where) does moral judgment work? Trends in Cognitive Science, 6, 517–523.
Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998–1002.
Hare, B. (2012, in preparation). A culture of compassion relies on a preference based approach to animal welfare. http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/research.htm.
Hare, B., Rosati, A., Kaminski, J., Brauer, J., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2010). The domestication hypothesis for dogs’ skills with human communication: A response to Udell et al. (2008) and Wynne et al. (2008). Animal Behaviour, 79, e1–e6.
Heinrich, B. (1999). Mind of the raven: Investigations and adventures with wolf-birds. New York: Cliff Street Books.
Hinde, R. A. (2002). Why good is good: The sources of morality. New York: Routledge.
Horowitz, A. (2012). Fair is fine, but more is better: Limits to inequity aversion in the domestic dog. Social Justice Research, 25(2). doi:10.1007/s11211-012-0158-7.
Jensen, K., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game. Science, 318, 107–109.
Langford, D. J., Crager, S. E., Shehzad, Z., Smith, S. B., Sotocinal, S. G., Levenstadt, J. S., et al. (2006). Social modulation of pain is evidence of empathy in mice. Science, 312, 1967–1970.
Lehner, P. N. (1996). Handbook of ethological methods (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Miklosi, A. (2009). Dog behaviour, evolution, and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Montgomery, S. (2011, November/December). Deep intellect. Orion. (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474/).
Neiworth, J. J., Johnson, E., Whillock, K., Greenberg, J., & Brown, V. (2009). Is a sense of inequity an ancestral primate trait? Testing social inequity in cotton top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 123(1), 10–17.
Olson, K. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Peterson, D. (2011). The moral lives of animals. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Pierce, J., & Bekoff, M. (2012). Wild justice redux: What we know about social justice in animals and why it matters. Social Justice Research, 25(2). doi:10.1007/s11211-012-0154-y.
Price, S. A., & Brosnan, S. F. (2012). To each according to his need? Variability in the responses to inequity in non-human primates. Social Justice Research, 25(2). doi:10.1007/s11211-012-0153-z.
Raihani, N. J. & McAuliffe, K. (2012). Does inequity aversion motivate punishment? Cleaner fish as a model system. Social Justice Research, 25(2). doi:10.1007/s11211-012-0157-8.
Range, F., Horn, L., Viranyi, Z., & Huber, L. (2008). The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0810957105.
Range, F., Leitner, K., & Virányi, Z. (2012). The influence of the relationship and motivation on inequity aversion in dogs. Social Justice Research, 25(2). doi:10.1007/s11211-012-0155-x.
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Schaller, G. B., & Lowther, G. R. (1969). The relevance of carnivore behavior to the study of early hominids. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 25, 307–341.
Skitka, L. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Sussman, R. W., & Cloninger, C. R. (Eds.). (2011). Origins of altruism and cooperation. Dordrecht: Springer.
Sussman, R. W., Garber, P. A., & Cheverud, J. M. (2005). Importance of cooperation and affiliation in the evolution of primate sociality. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 128, 84–97.
Talbot, C. F., Freeman, H. D., Williams, L. E., & Brosnan, S. F. (2011). Squirrel monkeys’ response to inequitable outcomes indicates a behavioural convergence with the primates. Biology Letters, 7, 680–682.
Thompson, P. R. (1975). A cross-species analysis of carnivore, primate, and hominid behaviour. Journal of Human Evolution, 4, 113–124.
Tinbergen, N. (1972). The spotted hyena in Hans Kruuk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tomasello, M., & Call, J. (2011). Methodological challenges in the study of primate cognition. Science, 334, 1227–1228.
van Wolkenten, M., Brosnan, S. F., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2007). Inequity responses of monkeys modified by effort. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(47), 18854–18859.
Yamamoto, S., & Takimoto, A. (2012). Social Justice Research (forthcoming).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pierce, J., Bekoff, M. Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters. Soc Just Res 25, 122–139 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-012-0154-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-012-0154-y