Humanity celebrates each new declaration of rights as moral progress, as if expanding them could heal the world. Yet with each generation, the same patterns of dominance persist. Injustice is not shrinking; it is evolving. Perhaps the problem is not how we use rights but that we created them at all. The question is not whether rights can protect but whether their very design can ever escape the logic of exclusion.
Rights are seen as moral guarantees that protect individuals from harm and tyranny. They are viewed as barriers to government interference and as promises of human dignity and equality. This view, influenced by Enlightenment ideas and incorporated into the American founding, rests on the belief that people have inherent rights that preexist the state (Hamilton, Madison, & Jay, 1788/1987; Locke, 1689/1980). However, even in this ideal design, there is a fundamental flaw. Rights depend on membership in a political community that can recognize and enforce them. To have a right is to be part of a recognized order, and belonging means being accepted by those already inside. As later critics noted, this system protects those who qualify while leaving others vulnerable, showing that exclusion is not a flaw of rights but their basis (Arendt, 1951).
From the start, rights and personhood were grounded not in equality but in hierarchy. They determine who matters, who belongs, and who must obey. They derive their power from exclusion, not inclusion. The idea that someone needs permission to exist or be acknowledged secretly harbors corruption. What seems like freedom is often the most effective form of control (Foucault, 1976/1978).
The logic of rights is rooted in ownership. To have rights is to claim control. The moral language of rights does not eliminate hierarchy; it enhances it. By portraying dignity as something that can be granted, revoked, or transferred, the language makes existence into property. For Macpherson (1962), liberal rights presuppose the possessive individual—a self defined by ownership of his own person—so the language of freedom does not escape the logic of property; it is its expression. We think we are protecting life, but we are actually managing it.
This system cannot deliver lasting justice because it was designed to preserve order and establish legitimacy. What began as a moral safeguard has become a tool for refinement. The more complex the rules, the more invisible the boundaries separating the entitled from the expendable (Kennedy, 2002).
Extending rights to new groups or even to the natural world may seem compassionate, but it does not challenge the foundation. Each extension pushes the boundaries of control. Every inclusion affirms the authority of the one who grants it. When a river is granted legal rights, for instance, it gains recognition only through human courts that still decide what its interests are. Such efforts risk placing nature within human law rather than outside it, where its value is self-evident (Stone, 1972, who himself acknowledged this risk; Berry, 1999). What is called recognition is, in reality, absorption.
By trying to address injustice through more rights or personhood, we often do not end the harm; we simply repeat it. Inclusion tends to reinforce the divide between those who give and those who receive. The system grows larger, its language becomes more generous, but its moral shape remains the same (Brown, 1995; MacKinnon, 1989). What was once completely denied is now granted under the guise of fairness. As Spivak (1988) argues, inclusion forces the marginalized to articulate their claims in terms the system can process, which reshapes and ultimately re-silences them. The wound is not healed; it is redefined.
There is, however, a pragmatic truth to recognize. Rights have provided protection where cruelty and neglect would otherwise prevail. They have alleviated suffering for many and established accountability where none existed. Reform advocates argue that this is precisely the point—that imperfect tools remain tools. Yet every extension of rights requires legitimizing the authority that grants them, thereby confirming the system as the proper source of justice even as it redresses injustice. The protection rights offer is therefore temporary, reliant on power, and structurally unable to change its source.
The illusion of progress rests on the belief that justice can be granted from above. However, justice does not begin in law; it begins in relationships. When relationships are whole, no one needs to be declared worthy. The moral world depends not on recognition but on participation—the quiet practice of living in respect with what exists (Irigaray, 2008; Plumwood, 2002).
There are ways of understanding the world that do not rely on ownership. They see value as innate rather than granted. They recognize that agency belongs to all living, moving, and sustaining things (Bennett, 2010). From this perspective, the concept of rights becomes unnecessary because belonging is never questioned. The earth does not need permission to matter; it only needs attention.
To repair what is broken, we must stop patching the old design. The moral architecture of rights and personhood cannot be reformed; it must be transcended. Justice will not come from expanding a system that masks it. It appears when the gap between “us” and “them” closes, when the need to categorize dissolves, and when relationship replaces control.
Justice is neither owned nor taken away. It is a state of being, a condition that arises whenever life is allowed to exist in its own way. When that truth is remembered, the language of rights will fall silent, and what remains will be the only thing that ever mattered: the unbroken relationship among all that exists.
References
Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Berry, T. (1999). The great work: Our way into the future. Bell Tower.
Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, volume 1: An introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976)
Hamilton, A., Madison, J., & Jay, J. (1987). The Federalist papers. (I. Kramnick, Ed.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1788)
Irigaray, L. (2008). Sharing the world. Continuum.
Kennedy, D. (2002). The critique of rights in critical legal studies. In W. Brown & J. Halley (Eds.), Left legalism/left critique (pp. 178–228). Duke University Press.
Locke, J. (1980). Second treatise of government. (C. B. Macpherson, Ed.). Hackett. (Original work published 1689)
MacKinnon, C. A. (1989). Toward a feminist theory of the state. Harvard University Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press.
Plumwood, V. (2002). Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.
Stone, C. D. (1972). Should trees have standing? Toward legal rights for natural objects. Southern California Law Review, 45(2), 450–501.
Comments
Welcome to the new Resillience commenting system!
We have moved from the former Disqus commenting system to a new system as of September 10, 2026.
We made this change because of privacy concerns regarding Disqus. It's also part of a set of changes to bring more services to the Resilience community under a single login: commenting, (coming September 2026), and online courses (coming 2027). Unfortunately, your old Disqus comments may not reliably link to your account in this new system. Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
it seems to me that rights are being confused with priviledges.
real rights are not granted from "above" they are inherent and acknowledged as inherent and are constraints on the behaviour of those who hold power who often are actively hostile to the very notion of rights – only to their unrestrained psychopathy
You’re putting your finger on a distinction that the article mostly blurs: between inherent rights (natural/inalienable) and rights-as-granted legal statuses (which are much closer to privileges).Rights vs privilegesIn standard philosophical and legal usage:Inherent or natural rights are understood as entitlements that belong to a person simply by virtue of being human (or, for some traditions, by virtue of being a being of a certain kind). They are not created by governments and cannot be legitimately taken away, only violated.�Privileges are permissions or benefits that depend on some authority’s decision and can be given, limited, or revoked; they are contingent on rules or membership, not inherent status.�So when a state “recognizes” inherent rights in a constitution or bill of rights, it is, at least in theory, acknowledging something that exists prior to and above positive law and binding itself—it’s not creating the right, it’s promising not to trample it.�Where the article slides categoriesThe Resilience piece treats “rights” almost entirely in the second sense: as things defined, allocated, and enforced by institutions that include some and exclude others. That description fits legal rights and privileges extremely well, but it underplays the natural/inherent conception you’re invoking.Your view aligns with the tradition that says:There are baseline constraints on what even a sovereign may legitimately do to persons (life, bodily integrity, some domain of liberty etc.).�Those constraints are logically prior to any state and morally bind rulers even when they deny them—in fact, the denial is evidence of their hostility to the very idea of being constrained.From that standpoint, when an authoritarian regime talks about “granting rights,” you’d say they are handing out privileges while continuing to violate actual rights they refuse to recognize.Rights as constraints on powerA lot of mainstream political theory is actually much closer to what you’re describing than to the article’s framing:Natural‑rights and human‑rights traditions explicitly cast core rights as limits on government: there are “fundamental rights that no government can legitimately overthrow or undermine,” and governments are justifiable only if they secure them.�In this view, the whole point is that rights bite hardest precisely on “those who hold power,” including when they find such limits intolerable. A government that systematically violates them loses its moral standing; it can have de facto power but lacks legitimate authority.�The Resilience article is right that, sociologically, actual enforcement still depends on institutions, and those institutions are often run by people who are indifferent or hostile to the constraints. But that empirical fact doesn’t collapse the conceptual difference between:a privilege: “you may do X as long as I don’t change my mind,” anda right properly so called: “whether I like it or not, I am not entitled to do Y to you.”Where I think you’re exactly rightSo I’d put it this way:If “rights” are understood purely as institutional permissions, the article’s critique mostly hits home—but then we are really talking about privileges and status positions.If “rights” are understood as inherent moral constraints on what may be done to persons (and, possibly, to other beings), then the article’s argument is attacking a different target than the one you’re talking about. In that register, your point that power‑holders are often actively hostile to the very idea of being constrained is precisely what the concept of rights is supposed to expose, not disguise.A more careful version of the article would have distinguished:inherent/natural rights (moral constraints that exist whether or not they’re recognized), andlegal rights/privileges (positive law statuses that can be used to recognize or to manipulate those constraints).Then the interesting question becomes: how do we design institutions so that inherent constraints actually bind the psychopaths with power, instead of being reduced to symbolic rhetoric?Would you be interested in digging into specific mechanisms that try to make those inherent constraints real in practice (constitutional design, judicial review, civil disobedience, rights of resistance, etc.) or are you more interested in the metaphysical grounding of those inherent rights?
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/analyze-and-critique-https-www-qHTzxAL8RBO52ysGJhqtBw
The article offers a sharp but lopsided philosophical critique of rights and personhood, underestimating both their historical role as tools of struggle from below and the practical vacuum that would exist if we “transcended” them without specifying alternative institutions.Core argument in plain termsThe author’s main claims are:Rights are structurally exclusionary because they depend on membership in a political community that recognizes them.Rights discourse is rooted in ownership and “possessive individualism,” so it inevitably reproduces hierarchy and control.Extending rights to new groups or to nature mostly expands the system’s reach, not justice itself.Justice arises from right relationship and participation, not from law, so the language of rights should ultimately “fall silent.”This is a synthesis of familiar strands from Arendt, Foucault, Macpherson, Kennedy, Spivak, Plumwood, etc., applied to contemporary rights talk.Strengths of the analysisAccurate diagnosis of dependency on power: The article correctly notes that rights “depend on membership in a political community that can recognize and enforce them,” and that this creates a structural vulnerability for those cast outside that community. That’s straight Arendt: the “right to have rights” is itself contingent on belonging to a polity.Clear on legitimation: each new rights expansion also “legitimizes the authority that grants them,” which is exactly the critique from critical legal studies (Kennedy, Brown) that law both restrains and reproduces power.Good warning about co‑optation: using rights to “include” nature may fold ecological value into human institutional logic; you can end up managing rivers as rights‑bearing objects within a technocratic framework rather than changing the underlying extractive relation.Useful reminder that justice is relational: the emphasis that “justice does not begin in law; it begins in relationships” echoes Indigenous and ecological traditions and helps counter the liberal illusion that better documents alone fix social reality.As a philosophical provocation, it’s coherent and grounded in a real literature; it pushes against complacent “more rights = more justice” stories in an important way.Weaknesses and gapsRights as only “top‑down” giftsThe essay treats rights almost exclusively as something “granted from above,” which misses their emergence from struggle. Historically, many rights were not benevolent concessions but outcomes of conflict—labor rights, civil rights, decolonization, women’s suffrage. In those contexts, rights claims are a language communities use to resist domination, not just a mechanism through which the powerful extend control.By ignoring this bottom‑up dynamic, the argument flattens rights into a single function (legitimation) and underplays their role as a tactical repertoire for the oppressed. The same instrument can be both co‑optable and indispensable in practice.Over‑totalizing the ownership critiqueThe move from “liberal rights grew within a possessive individualist ontology” (Macpherson) to “the concept of rights becomes unnecessary because belonging is never questioned” is a big leap. Even if the genealogy is accurate, it does not follow that every use of rights language today reproduces that original logic in full.Workers’ collective bargaining rights, for example, often constrain pure property claims rather than express them.Environmental rights for communities (e.g., rights to clean water) can limit corporate ownership regimes rather than just extend them.The article assumes a strong continuity between origin and function and doesn’t engage counter‑examples where rights claims have materially shifted power balances, even if imperfectly.Pragmatic ambiguity about “after rights”The piece ends with a call to “transcend” the moral architecture of rights and personhood and move to relationship‑based justice. But it leaves under‑specified:What institutional forms replace courts, constitutions, and rights when you face an abusive state or corporation?How do non‑ideal conditions—war, authoritarianism, fossil fuel extraction—get addressed without some formalizable claims and procedures?Relationship‑centric ethics are compelling at the level of norms, but when conflicts harden, you still need decision rules, enforcement mechanisms, and ways to articulate grievances in a shared language. Rights have functioned as that minimal common currency between antagonistic actors.Without concrete proposals—e.g., restorative justice institutions, Indigenous legal orders, commons‑based governance structures—the call for rights to “fall silent” risks being purely aspirational and not operational.Underestimation of second‑best worldsThe author concedes that rights “have provided protection where cruelty and neglect would otherwise prevail,” yet quickly dismisses this as temporary and structurally compromised. A more sober political theory would acknowledge that we live in a long‑term non‑ideal world where second‑best tools can still be non‑trivially valuable.For someone facing forced displacement, police violence, or toxic pollution, the difference between having enforceable rights and relying solely on “relationship” is enormous. The critique is philosophically clean but politically brittle: it does not really wrestle with triage, risk, and harm reduction.Binary framing of inside/outside the systemThe essay frames inclusion via rights as always reinforcing a divide between “those who give and those who receive,” citing Spivak’s concern that the subaltern must speak in the system’s terms. That’s a real problem, but the piece treats it as nearly absolute. In practice:Marginalized groups often strategically hybridize languages—using rights claims externally while sustaining different ontologies internally.Some legal reforms, especially when driven by social movements, genuinely alter power distributions rather than just rename the same hierarchy.The “either you resist the system or you legitimize it” binary understates the messy intermediate terrain where people live.Ecological and Indigenous perspectives only gestured atThe piece nods to Plumwood, Bennett, Berry, Irigaray, and a more relational view where “agency belongs to all living, moving, and sustaining things,” but that section is quite brief relative to the critique of rights. The positive vision—what governance rooted in these ontologies looks like—is thin compared to the negative diagnosis.That asymmetry makes the alternative feel more like a moral horizon than a worked‑through program. For readers looking for “what do we build instead?” the essay doesn’t provide much beyond evocative language about unbroken relationship.Alternative framing: rights as tools under constraintYou can keep much of the essay’s insight but land in a more usable position:Treat rights as contingent, historically situated tools, not as metaphysical guarantees. That preserves the critique of their exclusions and co‑optability.Recognize rights regimes as one layer within a broader ecology of norms: customary law, Indigenous law, reciprocal obligations, ecological limits, and local practices.Aim not for the outright silence of rights language, but for its demotion—from the ultimate language of moral worth to one instrument among others, explicitly subordinated to relational and ecological commitments.In that framing, extending rights to nature can be judged by whether it actually shifts material practices and power relations, not by whether it is philosophically pure. It is possible to say: “this river has legal personhood; that’s imperfect and anthropocentric, but it’s currently the most effective lever we have against a dam project, and we will use it while building deeper relational governance in parallel.”Where the article is most usefulThe essay is most valuable as a counterweight to liberal triumphalism about rights: it forces a re‑examination of who gets counted, who controls the discourse, and how law can pacify as much as emancipate. It is less helpful if read as a literal guide to dismantling rights regimes, because it does not seriously engage with institutional design under conflict and scarcity.If you treat it as a philosophical provocation—“what if our deepest categories of personhood and rights are themselves part of the problem?”—it opens productive questions, especially for environmental and Indigenous justice work. If you treat it as a practical program, you immediately run into missing steps between critique and replacement.Is there a particular angle you want to dig into further—e.g., ecological personhood, Indigenous legal orders as alternatives, or the Arendt/Foucault foundations of this critique?
In the current context of the complete debauchery and debasement of governance and judicial and executive powers in Amerikkka, this stuff seems like masturbatory philosophistry
thr ultimate question is when will Amerikkkans (and of course this applies to the G7/G20 finally breach their Banality of Evil and cease colluding and collaborating with the Vichy-esque regime in DC/ their Capitals ?
Whence shall come a competent committed credible courageous distributed de-centralized pre-emptive mass-self-defensive pushback against TheMachine and Emperor Dick-Tater-Tot and his whole incestuous in-bred REProbate cabal clique MAGA cult ?
our hyper-consumptive hyper-emissive eco-cidal psychosociopathic capitalist infinite-growth predatory-parasitic profiteering exploitive extractive trickle-up dominator cult-ures have pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed…
past Silent Spring
past Small Is Beautiful
pasy Limits to Growth
Well into Overshoot and Global Heating and destabilization of atmospheric and oceanic thermodynamics and existential predicaments and MetaCrisis
Abd yet …
Only the most perfunctory performative posturing is devoted to actual authentic real rights which are viewed with contempt and disdain by the perpetrators who are only to glad to wrap their perfidy and pathology in elaborate philosophistry
what will provide sufficient and necessary provocation / incitement to Act ??!!
Robespierre workshopped a solution to the LetThemEatCake-ers centuries ago!
of course things went a bit crazy in Le Terror
The wielders of Terror – Amerikkka – it's global warmongering hedgemonic terrorism Juggernaut… which flings "terror" like candies may require some of their own prescription
who shall prescribe and administer it ?
who shall breach their individual and collective Banality of Evil and defacto collaboration?