Rethinking human and nonhuman rights in the anthropocene Toward an ethics and cosmopolitics of ecological responsibility

This dissertation examines a tension between legal environmentalist strategies modeled on human rights and the anthropocentric framework underlying those rights. It argues that while ecological destruction increasingly threatens human rights, the same rights paradigm has also legitimized a political-economic system that exploits them through the ontological and ethical devaluation of nonhumans. The dissertation asks whether non-anthropocentric approaches to rights can be reconciled with perspectives that reject the Nature/Culture divide in favor of a situated account of more-than-human relationality.
Drawing on critical legal theory, posthumanism, philosophy, and anthropology, the argument developed is that liberal rights ultimately cannot accommodate a relational understanding of humans as co-constitutive parts of more-than-human worlds. The thesis critically examines three legal cases: Urgenda, rights of nature cases in Ecuador and New Zealand, and Ecocide. The project shows how these legal approaches, albeit in different ways, largely remain within a liberal rights framework and therefore leave intact the Modern mode of organizing the world.
The dissertation contends that the liberal concept of the rights-bearing subject is incompatible with posthumanist and nonmodern accounts centered on human-nonhuman relationality and responsibility. Rights tend to reinforce a Modern ontology of disembodied bounded individuals that are separate from ‘nature’, a legal framework (self-)ownership, a liberal politics of representation and non-interference, and an ethics of self-interest. In contrast to the certainty of rights, an ecological and relational perspective acknowledges the evitable and inevitable harm that comes with living and dying with more-than-human others and attunes us to accountability for those messy relations.