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
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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.
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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.
