Why Non-Human Rights?

Abstract

The common belief in the absolute justifiability and universal validity of human rights still confronts its own powerlessness today in the face of worldwide humanitarian catastrophes. Despite all of the recurring statements about the global protection of their human rights, the voices of the people affected remain unheard, and their legal position resembles a state of rights-deprivation and “bare life”. The legitimacy of these human living beings not yet protected by law cannot be established by the anthropocentric rhetoric of human rights ideologues. Instead, it requires the inclusion of associations of humans and things, of non-human living beings, and even of future generations. This is precisely where the chances of a re-humanization of the law lie, based on a posthuman “right to rights.”

Keywords:

• human rights
• posthumanism
• biopolitics
• legal personhood
• natural entities
• associations of humans and things

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2 Hannah Arendt, “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht,” Die Wandlung 5, no. 1 (1949): 754 f.

3 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, ed. W. Hamacher and D. E. Wellbery, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1 ff.

4 Friedrich Schiller, “Würde des Menschen,” in Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1797 (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1797), 33.

5 Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper: Der Erstdruck 1928. ed. J. Lucchesi (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1928/2004), 67.

6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1973), 290 ff.

7 Arendt, “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht,” 758.

8 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980), 143.

9 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7 ff.

10 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man. An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 41 ff.

11 Pierre Legendre, Das Verbrechen des Gefreiten Lortie. Abhandlung über den Vater. (Le crime du caporal Lortie. Traité sur le Père.), trans. C. Pornschlegel (Freiburg: Rombach, 1989/1998), 47, 109.

12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 366.

13 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3 f., 12 ff. and 63 ff.

14 Bernhard Windscheid, Lehrbuch des Pandektenrechts. Erster Band (Düsseldorf: J. Buddeus, 1862), 81.

15 Christoph Menke, Law and Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 40, 53.

16 Gunther Teubner, “The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by ‘Private’ Transnational Actors,” Modern Law Review 69, no. 3 (2006): 335.

17 Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, trans. M. Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 171 ff.

18 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16 [Ak. 6:223].

19 Gunther Teubner, “Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law,” Journal of Law and Society 33, no. 4 (2006): 497, 502 ff.

20 Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz and D. Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 103 ff.

21 Daniel C. Dennett, “Mechanism and Responsibility,” in Free Will, ed. G. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 155 ff.

22 Eugen Ehrlich, Die Rechtsfähigkeit (Aalen: Scientia, 1973), 1.

23 Arendt, “Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht,” 754 ff.

24 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes (London: Routledge, 2005), 3 ff.

25 Niklas Luhmann, “Inklusion und Exklusion,” in Soziologische Aufklärung 6: Die Soziologie und der Mensch (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995), 237 ff.; Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2, ed. M. Bal and H. de Vries, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 16 ff.

26 Susan Marks, “Law and the Production of Superfluity,” Transnational Legal Theory 2, no. 1 (2011): 1 ff.

27 Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75, no. 1 (2001): 111 ff. [CrossRef][10.1111/1467-8349.00081][Mismatch]

28 Andreas Fischer-Lescano, “Struggles for a global Internet constitution: protecting global communication structures against surveillance measures,” Global Constitutionalism 5, no. 2 (2016): 154.

29 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 1 ff. and 159 ff.; Malte-C. Gruber, Bioinformationsrecht. Zur Persönlichkeitsentfaltung des Menschen in technisierter Verfassung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 294 ff.

30 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 82.

31 Gustav Radbruch, Grundzüge der Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1914), 48 f.; Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. R. Edmonds (New York: Penguin, 1899/1966), 446 [Book II, Ch. 40].

32 Rudolf Wiethölter, Rechtswissenschaft (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1986), 18.

33 Luhmann, Social Systems, 213.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malte-Christian Gruber

Prof. Dr. Malte Gruber (born 1974) studied law and philosophy at the universities of Frankfurt/Main and Mainz. Following his legal clerkship, he began work as a practicing lawyer in 2001. In 2006 he was made a Research Fellow and in 2010 Assistant Professor at the Frankfurt Institute for Employment Law, Commercial Law and Civil Law. His PhD thesis, a legal-philosophical enquiry on the subject of “Legal Protection for Non-Human Life,” was successfully defended in 2005. In 2014, he completed his habilitation thesis (second monograph) on “Bio-Information Law: Being Human in a Technicized World,” as a result of which he was awarded the venia legendi for civil law, information and media law, technology law and legal theory. Following substitute professorships in Bremen and Frankfurt, he was appointed full Professor of legal philosophy and commercial law with a particular focus on intellectual property law and the law of new technologies at the University of Lucerne in spring 2017.