ABSTRACT
This paper starts with a question. Can nature have rights? To answer it, I first lay down two different positions in the environmental ethics – anthropocentrism and biocentrism – which offer diverging philosophical accounts of the moral standing and the capacity to bear rights of non-human, inanimate, non-sentient entities. Then, I provide an overview of a recent trend in contemporary comparative law: proliferation of different legal rights of, legal duties owed to, and special legal status granted to nature and other natural entities. Leaving aside the issue of nature as a bearer of moral rights out of which correlative moral duties would arise, in the central part of the paper I discuss whether classic theories of rights leave some conceptual room for acknowledging legal rights of nature. In doing so, I lay down a combined framework for conceptualising legal rights of nature: the so-called Correlativity Axiom that posits a strict correlativity between (claim-)rights and duties – two ‘jural correlatives’ as proposed by Hohfeld – paired with the idea of ‘specificationism’. This framework opens a possibility for deriving some specific or generalisable legal rights held by the individual parts of nature, or nature itself, from the existing individual or collective legal duties towards nature. Finally, through the lenses of this framework I engage with two major jurisprudential theories: Hart’s will theory and Raz’s interest theory of rights, through which I attempt to fit legal rights of nature within their accounts.
Petrić, Davor, Nature of the Rights of Nature (May 1, 2019).
First posted 2022-06-17 12:30:40
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