Will Kymlicka in the context of "Order of Canada"

John Bordley Rawls (/rɔːlz/; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971". Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy. In his later work Political Liberalism (1993), John Rawls addressed the question of how political power can be exercised legitimately in a society where citizens hold diverse and often conflicting moral, religious, and philosophical points of view.

An ethnonational group or ethno-national group is a group that is unified by both a common ethnicity and national identity (or political identity), that asserts historic claims to a territorial homeland. Recently, scholars have begun to use this term to refer to groups that are entitled to self-determination. An ethnonational group is different from an ethnic group, as an ethnic group can only be considered an ethnonational group if it is large enough and willing to constitute a nation state. An ethnonational group is often the largest group in a nation, that carries its national language and culture, although it can also form a sizeable minority in another state. According to political philosopher Will Kymlicka, ethnonational groups are groups that formerly had their own states historically, but now find themselves as a minority group within a larger state, often due to military conquest, annexation or unification with another state.

Wild animal suffering is suffering experienced by non-human animals living outside human care or control, arising from natural processes. Sources of harm include disease, injury, parasitism, starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, exposure to weather and natural disasters, killing by other animals, and psychological stress. Assessments of scope emphasize the very large numbers affected and the mechanisms that produce it, including natural selection, high-fecundity reproductive strategies (r-selection), high juvenile mortality, and population dynamics.

Religious, philosophical, and literary sources have variously explained, justified, accepted, or criticized harm in nature, with some advocating compassion or intervention and others defending non-intervention or the value of natural processes. Treatments appear in Christianity and Islam, and in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism; in religious contexts, it has been linked to the problem of evil and theodicy. Eighteenth-century figures include Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Gottfried Herder; nineteenth-century discussion features Lewis Gompertz, pessimist philosophers, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Stephens Salt; twentieth-century contributors include J. Howard Moore, William Temple Hornaday, and Alexander Skutch. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the topic has featured in scholarship in animal ethics and environmental ethics, including work by Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, Yew-Kwang Ng, Clare Palmer, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Steve F. Sapontzis, Stephen R. L. Clark, J. Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston III, David Pearce, Alasdair Cochrane, Kyle Johannsen, Catia Faria, Brian Tomasik, and Oscar Horta, in dedicated university and think tank programs, and in the work of advocacy organizations and research institutes.