ABSTRACT
The idea that human rights are anthropocentric is obvious yet striking. Historically, human rights have primarily been articulated as a claim against the state, as intra-human justice. But what if human rights were dependent on an even deeper foundational claim about the primacy of the human over the natural world? By focusing on the exclusion of the non-human, this chapter seeks to build a theory of the anthropocentrism of human rights, arguing that we cannot begin to understand human rights if we fail to understand them as a Western modernist movement of emancipation of humans from nature. Rediscovering the human rights movement as deeply humanist can help us to understand the instrumental role that ‘nature’ and ‘animals’ have long played in its constitution. This movement is replicated globally, as international human rights law solidifies an instrumentalist, proprietary, and exploitative relationship to the non-human. During a global crisis of anthropocentrism, it remains unclear that merely proclaiming a ‘right to a healthy environment’ or to endow the non-human with rights will not reproduce the very basic appropriative move that is at modernity's foundation. Only a further problematisation of ‘humanity’ and its internal exploitative processes, integrating the critique of rights and the case for environmental justice, can offer a route out of the curse of anthropocentrism – the definition of rights by the rights-holders themselves on the basis of an idealised version of the ‘human’.
