Ecological justice as ethical imperative: a critique of anthropocentric paradigms in the era of climate crisis

The article develops a critical analysis of how anthropocentric paradigms structurally constrain the contemporary discourse on climate justice and ecological justice. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2023, comparative documentary analysis of major institutional indicators including the most recent planetary-boundaries assessment, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II, and the most recent Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change, and a conceptual decomposition of dominant ethical frameworks across philosophy, environmental humanities, environmental politics, and Earth-system governance. The central finding is that anthropocentric ethics produces three structurally coupled disjunctions in climate-justice discourse — a species disjunction that separates the moral status of humans from that of non-human beings, a temporal disjunction that subordinates the standing of future generations to present preferences, and a spatial disjunction that decouples local moral obligations from planetary ecological dynamics — and that no one disjunction can be ethically resolved without resolving the other two. The empirical pattern documented in the institutional indicators reveals that the failure of climate governance to deliver substantive justice is not a contingent implementation failure but a structural consequence of the persistence of these three disjunctions in dominant ethical frameworks. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of the analytical framework of threefold ethical disjunction, which clarifies why isolated reforms within anthropocentric ethics cannot reconstruct ecological justice and which specifies the conditions under which a non-anthropocentric, multispecies, intergenerational, and planetary ethics could ground a substantive climate-justice imperative. Methodological limitations include reliance on aggregate indicators and the English-language concentration of the source literature.