Peter S. Wenz’s “environmental justice” develops a theory of environmental ethics around distributive justice. Libertarian theory, laissez faire economics, efficiency theory, cost-benefit analysis, and Rawls’s theory of justice are insufficient, even in combination. They count morally only subjective life. Among theories that count objective entities such as plants, species, and ecosystems, biocentrism cannot be consistently applied. Wenz places the personal moral agent at the center of widening concentric circles of weakening obligations. One problem is that the circles are both biographically and biologically determined. Another rises from using the category of justice to unify the theory.
