The Ontological Indifference of Rights of Nature

Abstract

The ontological question of whether nature ‘naturally’ has rights is related to indigenous people’s interactions with nature. In the academic discussion of that relationship, roughly two movements can be discerned. Indigenous people in the first movement would reject the idea of personality as something granted by humans to non-humans. A second movement is the view that thinking about rights does not coincide at all with indigenous people’s interactions with whatsoever; indigenous people, instead of a Western, dialectical discourse of rights, would have a more semiotic conception of normativity. In this way, the question of the ontology of rights for nature masks an underlying colonialism. A third perspective would offer an outcome from this discussion. This is the view that a philosophical-ontological discussion about the granting or recognition of rights for nature is just unimportant. The legal fiction theory merely declares the anthropological concept of man to be a legal subject and sees in the concept of legal personality a legal, dialectical construct, which, through sovereignty legitimated by the state, holds natural persons and legal persons to be equal. This argumentation is pragmatic and does not yield many legal-philosophical consequences.