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The vulnerable living order: human rights and the environment in a critical and philosophical perspective

Grear, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2993-1370 2011. The vulnerable living order: human rights and the environment in a critical and philosophical perspective. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2 (1) , pp. 23-44. 10.4337/jhre.2011.01.02

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Abstract

One of the problems encountered in bringing the discourses of human rights and environment together concerns the philosophical foundations lying beneath certain closures of liberal (legal) theory. Linking a destructive mind/body split to the destructive relationship between ‘humanity’ and the ‘environment’, the author argues that a critical analysis of legal anthropomorphism reveals a fundamental failure of representation at its heart, in so far as the ‘human being’ qua ‘human being’ is not fully included in it. On further analysis human beings can be seen to be functionally united with non-human animals and the environment in a form of conceptual exclusion linked to certain violences of capitalism. The author reflects upon the thought of Merleau-Ponty, offering it as a basis for an alternative philosophical lens through which to understand the relationship between human rights and the environment, one uniting them in the ontological vulnerability of the living order itself. Human beings, in this light, are not the hyper-rational subjects of liberal legal theory acting upon an objectified, exploitable ‘nature’. We are, rather, part of a living tissue of interconnection bearing profound implications for ethics, epistemology and legal theory.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Law
Subjects: K Law > K Law (General)
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISSN: 1759-7188
Last Modified: 05 Jan 2024 08:31
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/53983

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