Durham E-Theses Environmental Rights MCKINNELL, ELIZABETH,MARY How to cite: MCKINNELL, ELIZABETH,MARY (2010) Environmental Rights, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/261/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Introduction The idea for this thesis grew out of a dichotomy in the way that environmental problems are often discussed. Politically, there is an increasing demand that we frame environmental problems in the language of rights and justice, with ‗environmental rights‘ forming the content of declarations and bills of rights. This appears to clash with a view presented by some environmental philosophers that the language of rights is simply not up to the task of addressing environmental problems. It is claimed that the way that we characterise individual rights is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This is because rights are often formulated from an individualistic and overly humanistic stance which will not enable us to see beyond the concerns of white western human individuals. Each of these views has a certain appeal. The everyday language of rights has a nuance of importance and urgency. It is one thing to say that we ought to protect the environment for the sake of the inhabitants of this planet, but to say that those inhabitants have a right that action should be taken sounds like a call to arms. This particular ‗ought‘ makes a special kind of moral and political demand that cannot be ignored. Rights have been employed to good effect in many struggles for equality, freedom and recognition, and it may appear that they should be employed in this way once again, especially when the scale of right-violations that might occur appears to be so great. Related to this is the fact that many environmental problems affect some communities and geographical areas to a greater extent than others. The inhabitants of some areas of Africa will probably experience the impact of climate change in a much more devastating way than the inhabitants of some areas of Europe. This suggests that the demands of justice call upon us to address these problems. Not to do so would be to exploit certain groups of people for our own material comfort, and to deny 1 them their right to equal treatment, or to the kind of liberty that they would require to lead flourishing lives. This would suggest both that rights are an indispensible element of the way that we articulate environmental concerns, and that they could be a powerful tool in environmental activism. The opposing view is also compelling. It might be suggested that we cannot address the environmental problems without looking to their root causes, and that one such cause is a dominant ideology based on putting the human individual ahead of community and global concerns, and ahead of our responsibility to other creatures, ecosystems and the planet. It might then be said that if the concept of rights is necessarily bound up with such a world- view, then we cannot properly address environmental concerns unless we either jettison the role of rights altogether or give them a much more minor role than they currently play in moral and political deliberation. There is a popular view in the field of environmental ethics that many conventional moral theories such as utilitarianism, Kantianism and so on are not the appropriate tools for considering the interaction between mankind and the natural environment. Instead, many environmental ethicists seek to employ ways of talking about our relationship with the world that are less humanistic, individualistic and anthropocentric. Rights theories occupy much of the same ground as these conventional moral theories, often epitomising the features that many environmental ethicists critique. They are generally centred on human activity and moral status (some theories do this more than others, as we shall see) and are usually concerned with the relationships between individual human beings with respect to aspects of the world, rather than with relationships between people and the natural world. As right-holders, people are to an extent alienated or set apart from other features of the planet, something which apparently contradicts the holistic nature of environmental ethics. Thus a consideration of the compatibility of rights-theories and 2 environmental ethics might lead to further things we can say about the general question of which types of moral theory can properly be applied to environmental questions. Purpose and Methods The objective of this thesis is to examine moral and political environmental issues in the context of rights, particularly moral or natural rights. The central question will be whether anyone can have a right to a particular kind of environment or minimal environmental standard. I will also consider which beings (if any) can have their moral demands articulated in this way. While I am largely concerned with the idea of moral rights, I hold that when we employ rights-talk, the moral and the political cannot be fully extricated from each other. This is partly down to the history of rights, which gives them a distinctive dual moral and political character, and partly that when dealing with issues of widespread moral concern, the moral is rarely entirely separable from the political. However, I will not look in detail at the task of implementing such rights through political and constitutional systems. My interest is rather in the underlying justifications of such rights and how they should be articulated. I aim as far as possible to remain neutral between different moral theories, since working within a particular theory would significantly narrow the application of the thesis. The methods used also do not strictly conform to any one school or style of philosophy. In much of this thesis a broadly analytic approach is applied to the questions that are being considered, but in other places different approaches are appropriate, both in terms of the method employed and the sources used. I would argue that were we to adhere too rigidly to one approach, there is a danger that adherents of opposing views would often simply ‗speak past each other‘ and fail to engage with the substantive issues upon which they differ. Chapter One A large portion of the first part of the thesis will be historical in character, examining the development of the various theories of rights that exist today. The first chapter will be 3 concerned with the early history of rights theories and their development into a form roughly equivalent to modern-day theories. I will say a little more at the start of the chapter about why this approach is justified, arguing that we must have some understanding of the historical origins of rights theories in order to understand what purpose they serve and how they should be understood in the present day. I also address some of the difficulties with taking such an approach. In this chapter I identify some prominent features that we can see in many theories of rights, and trace their emergence. One of the major conclusions of this chapter is that the concept of rights is broad, varied and dynamic. It would therefore be a mistake to consider the question of environmental rights in terms of one narrow conception of what a right can be. We must therefore adopt the considerably more ambitious task of examining the possibility of environmental rights of many different kinds, even accepting the possibility that new ideological challenges may prompt further developments and refinements of the concept of a right. Chapter Two Chapter two moves on to look at two of the famous critiques of rights, offered by Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx. I argue that the objection that rights have no foundation because there is no natural lawgiver would require more justification than we can find in the works of Bentham, but that it does raise important questions about whether there can be a natural basis to rights that I engage with later in the thesis. Marx‘s claim that they are a socially divisive force is in many ways more of an obstruction, especially to the project of assigning environmental rights. This leaves us with a number of options. One would be to go against Marx and claim that the individual must be the sole locus of concern, while another would be to modify our theory of rights so that it can account for the rights of groups. A final option 4 would be to apply different moral concepts alongside rights in a way that might account for the value of community and collective goods. Chapter Three Chapter three is largely an outline of some of the forms that more recent theories of rights have taken. This is necessary in order to furnish us with the detail we need when applying these theories to environmental problems. While the notion of moral rights has been around for a very long time, it is only really in the twentieth century that rights were integrated into rigorous and complex formulations.