We live in a time of rapid, global, and long-lasting environmental and technological changes. On the one hand, technological innovation is a major driver of environmental degradation, as illustrated by the pollution caused by agricultural pesticides, ozone layer depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gas emissions caused by fossil fuel combustion, and the radioactive waste of nuclear power plants.

Under the looming specter of mass extinction and escalating climate change, life itself becomes the terrain of various justice struggles. As philosopher Eva von Redecker notes, many recent social justice movements, including climate (“Extinction Rebellion”), feminist (“Ni una menos”), anti-racist (“I can’t breathe”) and Indigenous (“Water is life”) mobilizations explicitly make reference to the politics of life. At the same time, technological developments in the life sciences challenge traditional philosophical accounts of the very meaning of life.

The planetary boundary framework defines a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ that requires staying within certain biophysical boundaries of the Earth system (Rockström et al., 2009). Recently, Earth system scientists and social scientists have proposed to complement these biophysical boundaries with ‘just Earth system boundaries’, which encompass three dimensions of justice – intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice (the ‘3I approach’) – that are brought together under the concept of ‘planetary justice’ (Gupta et al., 2023).