On Becoming Human and Being Humane: Human Rights, Women’s Rights, Species Rights

Abstract

This essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights. It argues that in transforming vulnerability from a stigma that alienated women from their humanity to the signature of human dignity, women bridged the gap between the liberatory promise of human rights and its exploitative patriarchal politics. It finds that the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Drucilla Cornell, and Jean-Luc Nancy were/are crucial to this transformed idea of dignity. Religious ideas have played a complex role in this transformation. Wollstonecraft appealed to theological ideas of the soul to contest men’s claims that the Bible enshrined women’s subordination to men. Current abortion politics in the U.S., and the Iranian women’s Women, Life, Freedom rebellion continue to show how sacred texts have been used to defend and reject women’s demands for rights. Religious and secular arguments for the dignity of vulnerability, used by feminists to re-write the sexual difference, direct us to rethink our exploitative relationship to the earth and the multiple species it harbors. As we take up the task of confronting the environmental crisis of our times, they call on us to see ourselves as stewards of the earth’s bounty who are morally obliged to create humane relationships with our other-than-human neighbors.

1. Introduction

The language of human rights seems clear. They are our birth right. The history of human rights tells a different story. Here, being designated as human is not a birth right but rather a privilege that can be granted or denied. Yes, all human beings have human rights but, no, being born human is insufficient evidence of your humanity. Depending on the time and place, certain characteristics will define you as human while others will exclude you. If you are among those whose race, religion, sex, or class bar you from being recognized as human, you may accept the status quo or rebel. Your rebellion may appeal to the arguments and empathetic appeals of human rights to dismantle the injustice of its history by insisting (a) that though the current criteria are valid, the denial of your humanity is a mistake, your identity matches that of those recognized as human or (b) that the criteria are untenable and must be changed (Douzinas 2000, pp. 256–57).

Women, appealing to the language of human rights to upend the patriarchal worlds that normalized their oppression, discovered that the first route to their becoming human was closed. They could not meet the criteria of who counts as human. When human rights declarations said that all men are created equal, they were being literal. Equality is reserved for men. Excluded men could become human by appealing to patriarchal instantiations of the sexual difference. Asserting their masculinity, they could insist on their right to have rights. With this option closed, women rejected it as a patriarchal prejudice. They changed the meaning of the sexual difference from one that justified their exclusion from their right to have rights to one that affirmed their humanity (Wollstonecraft 1997; MacKinnon 2006; Beauvoir 2010).

According to patriarchal logic, humanity is reserved for those who are autonomous, independent, invulnerable, and rational. According to patriarchal ideology, these humanizing traits are sexed. They were said to be visible in the superior strength of the male body. Women’s weaker bodies were read as signs of a disabling dependency, a vulnerability that rendered them unfit for rights. Insisting on their humanity, women rejected their degradation by transforming vulnerability from a sexed stigma to a shared signature of human dignity (Mann 2014; Beauvoir 2010; Cornell 2003). They exposed the idea of autonomous invulnerability as a myth perpetuated by the powerful—those who can afford not to see their dependency on and vulnerability to those who serve them. Hegel, no feminist but a fan of the dialectic, makes this clear in his account of the master slave relationship.

In exposing autonomy as a privileged rather than a human condition, women transformed the idea of who counts as human from an autonomous man to an intersubjective person. Our humanity, they argued, is expressed in our embodied inter-corporeal, intersubjective, vulnerable lives. Doing this, they became part of the expansive history of human rights. Costos Douzinas attributes this history of increased inclusiveness to the fact that the idea of rights is flexible, open to any subject or object (Douzinas 2000, p. 254). Becoming more explicit, he argues that because the idea of the human is a floating signifier that can be attributed to any number of signifies, numerable human attributes can be attached to it (Douzinas 2000, p. 255). Viewed through the lens of the human as a floating signifier, women’s drive for their right to be recognized as human can be seen as attaching the signifiers vulnerability, embodiment and intersubjectivity to the signifier “human”. Further, in invoking the ideas and ideals of human rights, they made it more than a linguistic exercise, for, as Douzinas notes, “the humanity of human rights … carries an enormous symbolic capital, a surplus of value and dignity endowed by the revolutions and the declarations and augmented by every new struggle for the recognition and protection of human rights” (Douzinas 2000, p. 255).

Reading the entanglement of the history of women’s becoming human within the broader history of the discourses and politics of rights, I read both histories as a continuous re-evaluation and rejection of the ways that vulnerability is exploited. In the case of women, this exploitation targets their sex. This exploitation is complicated by the fact that we are never simply women, but always women of a distinct race, class, religion, and sexuality, for example. As there is no singular way of being a woman, there are multiple ways of degrading us. It is also the case, however, that though we will be degraded as women of a certain race, class, religion or sexuality, the tactics used to destroy us differ from the tactics used against “our” men. As the “sex”, we are raped and abused for pleasure and profit. The statistics are irrefutable; though being a woman of a privileged race, class or religion may protect you from certain forms of degradation, these privileges offer no immunization from sexual assault, harassment, or rape. Your vulnerability as the sex will prevail.

This fact drives the questions that occupy the major portion of this essay: how has the stigma of vulnerability been used to alienate women from their humanity? How have women transformed the meaning of human rights to dignify this vulnerability? Crucial to this argument is the idea that as intersubjective subjects, we are morally obliged to see ourselves as guardians of each other’s vulnerabilities. Living in an age that some have called the Anthropocene, matters of human rights bleed into matters of species and environmental rights—for our exploitation of their vulnerabilities threaten our existence as well as theirs. This fact brings renewed attention to the idea of rights and of who counts as deserving them. Now, it is not only a matter of defusing the threat that we pose to each other but of ameliorating the damage we have inflicted on other species and the planet. Taking up this responsibility through the rhetoric and politics of rights is a twofold project. On the one hand, it resets the issue of human rights to address the ways that such environmental issues as climate change and pollution impact some human populations more than others. On the other hand, it directs us to affirm our humanity by validating the worth of the other-than-human species with whom we share the earth.

As women showed us that challenging accepted definitions of who counts as eligible for rights is essential to using the universal language of rights to challenge its partisan politics, their specific reconfigurations of the subject of rights provide tools for aligning current ideas of rights with the needs of the current age. Their validation of inter-corporeal vulnerability attunes us to the dignity of other species and directs us to look for the ways that the idea of rights can affirm their unique modes of life. It transforms our relationship to these different ways of being from an instrumental one that either legitimates their exploitation for our benefit or protects them only when it is necessary to protect us to one that, in refusing to equate difference with inferiority, creates humane ways of living with those who are radically other.

In sum, this paper uses the philosophical tools of feminist theory, existentialism, and phenomenology to argue that women succeeded in their demands to be recognized as human, entitled to the rights due to all human beings, by reconfiguring the subject of rights from that of an autonomous, rational man to that of an intersubjective, embodied, vulnerable being who is inexorably embedded in and reliant on others. Detailing this history, I bring it to bear on current environmental concerns and species rights issues. Here, I move into interdisciplinary territory, aligning the ideas of philosophers with the work of scientists researching animal behavior and laypeople who interact with other animal species. I argue that we cannot isolate matters of human rights from matters of the rights of the earth and the other-than-human lives it harbors. Thus, the questions at the heart of this paper: How can the resignification of the subject of rights crucial to the ideas, rhetoric and politics of women’s’ pursuit of their right to be human inform current approaches to climate change, environmental degradation and species extinction? How can the idea of the dignity of vulnerability that provided the umbrella for women’s pursuit of their rights provide an avenue for recognizing the dignity and rights of non-human lives? The point of raising these questions is to provide the impetus for multifaceted discussions among those engaged in pursuing a rights agenda, and those concerned with developing technological tools and policy programs for addressing issues raised by the fact of living in what many are calling the Anthropocene—a time when human activity determines the fate of the earth and its inhabitants. Tethering rights and technological and policy questions together is also and importantly one way of ensuring that as we take up the task of securing the material survival of our species, we embrace technologies and policies that secure its moral survival as a humane species in a world that is hospitable to us and our other-than-human neighbors.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. The following sections of this essay: On the Right to be Human; On Dignity; Transforming the Subject of Human Rights; Solid Things Become Fluid; #METOO; An Ethics of the Caress; and Recalibrating the Compass of Rights provide them. The sections On the Right to be Human and On Dignity describe the troubled history of human rights and the ways that women appealed to the promissory power of the rhetoric and politics of rights to reject their imprisonment in patriarchal prejudices and politics. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment defense of women’s rights is the touchstone here. The sections Transforming the Subject of Human Rights and Solid Things Become Fluid turn to contemporary phenomenological–existential, feminist, and deconstructive accounts of the subject to debunk the liberal idea/ideal of the rational autonomous subject. They show how women used these accounts of the subject to de-stigmatize the feminization of vulnerability and to translate the right to the pursuit of happiness into an affirmation of the right to one’s desire. The #ME TOO and An Ethics of the Caress sections envision a future where the vulnerability that is inescapably human and inexorably humanizing is protected rather than exploited. Holding us responsible for realizing this future, they ask if we have the political will to create it. The final section, Recalibrating the Compass of Rights, ties the issue of human rights to the issue of the other-than-human rights of the earth and the other-than-human lives its harbors. Arguing for these other than human rights can take two forms. One takes the position that the life of the earth and its other-than-human inhabitants are valuable in themselves. The other argues that protecting our right to life requires protecting theirs. Neither argument precludes the other. It is a matter of focus. As this essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights, it will develop the idea that protecting their vulnerability is essential to protecting ours.

2. On the Right to Be Human

The language of human rights is universal. The history of human rights belies this universality. The American Declaration of Independence was written by men who owned slaves, people whose humanity was erased in their designation as property. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen further muddied the universality of the idea. Were all men qualified to claim human rights, or were these rights reserved for citizens? Turning to the state rather than God as the guarantor of rights, the French Declaration revealed what the American Declaration obscured. Human rights are political/legal rights. To enjoy them, you must be recognized by those who have the power to establish their humanity and by virtue of this power to determine who else qualifies (Douzinas 2000).

To pass the humanity test of the early declarations, you had to embody a specific sex, race, and class. Women were among those who were disqualified. Judged against the valorized male body whose superior strength was said to signify an autonomous invulnerability that marked the dignity of the human condition, women’s weaker bodies were said to signal a unique vulnerability that degraded their humanity. Not being autonomous, invulnerable men, they were not among those the American Declaration’s God created as equal. Not being autonomous, invulnerable men, they could not become citizens whose humanity the French Declaration protected by the power of the state. So long as this signification of the human prevailed, women could not become human. They became human by re-signifying the idea of the human. Doing this, they opened the way for future re-significations for they showed that the idea of the human is historical and mobile. It is what some philosophers refer to as a floating signifier. As we shall see, it is not only the idea of the human that is historical and mobile. As the idea of the subject of rights changes, the idea of rights changes with it.

Insisting on their place among those who counted as human, women refused to accept the autonomous man’s misogynous logic of vulnerability. They exposed the violence legitimated by this logic and debunked the lie of an independent, invulnerable subject. From birth to death, we are reliant on others. Our subjectivity is always and necessarily intersubjective. Far from being a stigmatized feminine condition, vulnerability is an inherent humanizing feature of the intersubjective human condition.

Undoing the misogynous logic of vulnerability did not happen all at once. Taking the sting out of being a woman took time. Mary Wollstonecraft took one of the first steps. Caught in the Enlightenment’s Cartesian legacies of mind body dualism, she did not/could not directly confront the myth of autonomy. Rather, she aligned secular dualism with the Christian theology of the soul to argue (a) that the soul rather than the body was the seat of or humanity and (b) that though men’s stronger bodies might be considered superior to women’s weaker bodies, this difference had no bearing on women’s and men’s God-given souls or their status as human beings. Yes, men’s bodies are stronger than women’s, but, no, different bodies do not indicate a difference in souls. Though the body is sexed, the soul is not. As possessed of souls, the mark of human dignity, women and men are equally human and have equal rights to human rights (Wollstonecraft 1997, especially Chapter IV).

The men of the times, calling themselves logical, ignored the dualistic equality logic of the immateriality of the soul. Calling themselves good Christians, they committed the heresy of sexing and gendering the soul. They insisted that women’s weaker bodies were signs of their inferior souls. Instituting a hierarchy of souls’ men rendered women unfit for human rights. As unfit for rights, women were fitted into positions that subordinated them to men.

Caught in the paradigm of her times, Wollstonecraft could not argue for women’s rights by asserting the dignity of their bodies. Turning away from the matter of the body, she exposed the theological heresy and logical fallacy that sexed and gendered the soul and used Cartesian logic to equate the soul with the mind. As unsexed souls/minds, women and men were not only equal in the eyes of God, they were, as equally capable of rationality, equally entitled to the rights of man.

In giving Wollstonecraft theological openings, Enlightenment ideology also closed off certain possibilities. It required that she cite reason and the capacity for rationality as defining marks of our humanity and to avoid the idea that empathy, caring, and emotions humanized us. Her rational arguments for women’s rights could not appeal to our capacity to feel women’s suffering. Unable to argue against the dualism of her times, she was forced to mute the fact that rape, sexual assault, and bodily violence violated women’s personhood. Unable to argue that bodily rights are human rights, she could not say what she saw and be heard (Wollstonecraft 1997, p. 191). Reading Wollstonecraft’s arguments for women’s rights reveals the violence in the arguments for men’s exclusive right to human rights. Not only does it justify violence against those who fail the test of the rational man, it does not allow assaults on the body and the exploitation of the body’s vulnerability to count as assaults on personhood (Bergoffen 2021).

Probing the lacuna of the Enlightenment Declarations of rights and interrogating the idea of the human embedded in these declarations raises (at least) four questions: (1) what is the source of these rights? (2) Who is entitled to them? (3) What counts as their violation? (4) How do those deprived of their rights get them? The United Nations Declarations of Human Rights (UNDHR), the South African Constitution and the Preamble to the Rome Statue that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) bring these questions into focus as it moves them into new territory.

Where the French Declaration transferred the guarantor of human rights from God to the state, today’s documents locate it in a communal recognition of injustice. Where the eighteenth-century documents were written by and for those who could use violence to secure their rights, these twentieth-century documents were written by those who witnessed the violence that transformed human beings into fodder for the crematoria (the UNDHR), suffered the violence of apartheid (the South African Constitution), and saw the need to give human rights declarations legal teeth (the ICC). Today, the responsibility for guaranteeing rights falls to the witness. It is no longer assumed that those who are denied the right to be recognized as human can speak for themselves. In asking us to bear witness to the suffering of others, these documents do not rely on arguments alone to make their case. They ask us to put ourselves in another’s place. To experience their plight as if it were ours. As we shall see, this duty of the witness to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves takes on new significance as we confront the current environmental and species extinction crisis.

Relying on communal recognition of injustice and the shocked conscience of humanity (UNDHR) to guarantee rights, however, is tricky business. What if the injustice is not recognized as such? What if it is ignored? What if the conscience of humankind is not shocked? Raising these questions is one way of seeing that for the conscience of humankind to register that a human rights violation has occurred, a shared idea of who counts as human must in place. If one is identified as property, nothing done to them will become a matter of conscience. Once one is identified as fully human, however, violations of their dignity will be recognized as human rights crimes. Perpetrators will be prosecuted by the ICC.

3. On Dignity

Where the eighteenth-century human rights declarations declared the equality of all (where all meant some men) without explicitly referencing the idea of dignity, twentieth-century human rights documents are explicit. The UNDHR declares that all human beings are “born free and equal in dignity”. Article 5 stipulates that no one shall be subjected to degrading treatment or punishment. The Federal Republic of Germany declared that the dignity of man is inviolable. Article 1 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights affirms the inviolability of human dignity.

Reflecting on what these later documents say and what earlier ones implied, Yechiel Michael Barilan finds that the idea of dignity is the theoretical ground of all human rights claims (Barilan 2012). The idea of dignity, however, is mobile. It is tied to the idea of the human at hand. When Wollstonecraft was writing and the idea of the autonomous man prevailed, dignity was defined in terms of a disinterested abstract rationality. Violations of bodily integrity did not register as violations of one’s dignity. Today’s phenomenologists, existentialists, and feminists call on the conscience of humanity to affirm dignity of the lived body. Neurological studies show that reason is affectively charged, that the idea of pure reason is a fantasy (Barrett 2017). Debunking the claims of the rational man, scientists (Frost 2016) and theorists (Merleau-Ponty 2012; Nancy 2021a) direct us to see ourselves as desiring, cognitively embodied beings who are inextricably intertwined within environments and among others like and unlike us. Understood in this way is to understand that the dignity of being human is expressed in the diverse ways that we move amongst each other and within the world.

Transforming desire from an irrational danger that requires policing by reason to a respectable feature of our humanity transforms the right to the pursuit of happiness from an almost forgotten source of dignity into a central one. So long as the degrading irrationality of desire was figured as woman, and the policing force it required was identified as men, men’s right to the pursuit of happiness could be, and was seen, as men’s right to control women’s sexuality. Claiming the right to their desire while denying it to woman entailed two other claims. First, that men alone possessed the rationality that positioned them as having the right to have rights. Second, that, as autonomous, they had the right to their desire without consideration for the desire of others. The exclusive rationality claim was refuted by Wollstonecraft. Remaining within the Enlightenment paradigm, she left the autonomy claim intact. Drucilla Cornell, unconstrained in this way, probed the meaning of desire and threw out the autonomy claim.

4. Transforming the Subject of Human Rights

So long as the body was seen as an unfit candidate for rights, the basic facts of human interdependency could be ignored. Cornell argues that once our embodiment is seen as essential to our humanity and once desire is seen as inherently humanizing, these facts must be taken into account. This accounting, she insists, requires transforming the subject of rights from one who is autonomous and independent to one who is essentially intersubjective and, as such, crucially dependent on others (Cornell 2003). There is nothing abstract about this interdependency. As born prematurely, our survival depends on those who nurture us. Outgrowing our early biological dependency, we never outgrow our historical, social, and cultural embeddedness in and dependency on others. Maturing is not a matter of becoming autonomous but rather a matter of becoming attuned to and taking responsibility for the intersubjectivity of our right to the pursuit of happiness—a right that Cornell identifies as the right to claim our desire. This right, she argues, is violated when one person uses another without having to justify a claim on her (Cornell 2003, p. 147). This individual, necessarily intersubjective, right comes to naught when legal codes and social and cultural practices that condone forced marriages, forced pregnancies, and forced abortions are in place; when rape and sexual abuse are either legitimated or ignored; when states and corporations reap the profits of sex and labor trafficking.

Barilan points to the need to give the language of rights political and legal traction when he insists that securing and protecting human rights requires environments that endorse them (Barilan 2012, p. 232). Like Cornell, who speaks of the right to our desire, he affirms the dignity of desire. Where Cornell implies that in claiming the right to our desire, we are affirming the dignity of our sexuality, Barilan is explicit. He ties the dignity of sex to the sexual integrity of the person (Barilan 2012, p. 258). Going further, he argues that as ennobling the joys of intimacy, protecting sexual integrity is important for the well-being of society (Barilan 2012, pp. 259–60). Thus, it is not only the case that supportive environments are necessary to secure individual rights but it is also the case that protecting individual rights are essential to the health of society. Again, divesting the idea of individual rights from the idea of autonomy is key. It is because we are as individuals always and necessarily intersubjective that individual rights are linked to the health of our communal lives.

By bringing the eighteenth century’s right to the pursuit of happiness into the twentieth century, Cornell and Barilan say what Wollstonecraft could only whisper: the ideology of the autonomous man and its patriarchal iteration of the sexual difference gives men the right to their desire for women’s bodies without regard to women’s desire. In its original iteration the right to the pursuit of happiness subjected women to sexual violence.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Sexistence and his interview with Irving Goh in The Deconstruction of Sex push Cornell’s and Barilan’s affirmation of the dignity of sexual desire further. More than an expression of our humanity, Nancy finds it uniquely humanizing. It testifies, he says, to the singularity of the person. This singularity is revealed in the proliferation of sexual styles that, in expressing our distinctiveness, are also and necessarily sites of communication. The desire to be singular and the desire to be recognized in our singularity entangles our being for ourselves with our being for others (Nancy 2021a, pp. 25, 75). For Nancy, the singularity that we think of as a person is always caught up in the plurality of their existence with/for/within/among others.

As sexual beings attuned to each other, our bodies and boundaries run into each other. Our desires carry the chance to be, and the risk of being, open to each other and the world—chances and risks that invite the joy of being carried away, escaping oneself, letting go of oneself (Nancy 2021a, p. 32). Speaking with Goh, Nancy brings his position from the academic into the public realm. He argues that because sex and sexuality “constitutes our ontology or rather co-ontology…[it]…complicates our political, ethical and aesthetic subjectivities” (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 7).

One complication concerns the meaning of our embodied vulnerability. Where in Wollstonecraft’s times women’s weaker bodies were said to signify their inferior souls, today, their weaker bodies are stigmatized as vulnerable bodies—bodies available for victimization, bodies whose desire does not count. In one sense, this difference makes no difference. So long as vulnerability is sexed, men will be able to see themselves as immune to the risks of intersubjectivity. In unsexing vulnerability, Nancy’s sexual co-ontology, like Cornell’s and Barilan’s attention to sexual desire, exposes the cowardice of men’s insistence on autonomy. Nancy, Cornell and Barilan show that in attempting to flee the risks of vulnerability, “autonomous” men are sacrificing the humanity of the joys of intimacy for the security of the power of domination (Bergoffen 2016).

If there is anything good about the global epidemic of violence against women, the sex trafficking that enslaves women, or the horizon of rape, assault and harassment that haunts our lives, and I do not think that there is, it might be this: in dignifying vulnerability, we should not romanticize its risks. It is because these risks are dangerously real that we need to create and enforce legal codes and social movements that hold those who use sex to satisfy their desire to use another for their pleasure and profit accountable. Nancy does not ignore these risks. He calls rape a negation of the other (Nancy 2021a, pp. 69, 98). He describes it as the rapist’s desire for mastery—a desire that suppresses the reciprocal relation expressed in sexual desire (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 64). By suppressing this relation, he says, the rapist nullifies sex itself (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 39). Calling rape a form of murder (Nancy and Goh 2021, pp. 42–43), Nancy aligns his ontology of existence with the verdict of the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that criminalized rape as a crime against humanity.

5. Solid Things Become Fluid

As feminist politics unmasks the ideology of autonomy as a flight from the risks of vulnerability, Nancy finds current ideologies of subjectivity engaged in another flight. Here, it is an attempt to exchange the anxieties of our necessarily unstable and undecidable subjectivity for the security of a clearly defined and stable subject. These flights reinforce each other. Nancy tells Goh that the subject he deconstructs is “so certain of its capacity for rational thought and self-sufficiency …that it presumes to occupy a fixed sovereign position in the world” (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 8). This certainty, he continues, is found in the “distinct ideas or fixed judgments that our entire tradition of thought has accustomed us to consider as elementary requirements of thought and conduct” (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 31). The sovereign subject, so certain of who he is, is also certain of who you are. This certainty is the lynchpin of a patriarchal world where the masculine subject’s sovereign clear and distinct “I” creates a submissive clear and distinct feminine “YOU” that is exploitable.

In places where the injustices of these clear and distinct identities are being challenged, movements to resurrect them abound. Men’s resistance to upending the security of the patriarchal order is easily understandable. Their security comes with power. Viewed through the lens of this security, women’s defense of patriarchy becomes intelligible if we think of it in terms of a bargain: accept exploitation in return for relief from the anxiety of not being sure of who you are or where you belong.

As often as not, this promise of security offered by patriarchy is clothed in religious garb. This makes it tempting to argue that the fight for women’s rights pits modern secularists against those who believe in traditional religious ideas. As Wollstonecraft showed, things are not so straightforward. Religious authority can be used as an ally of women’s rights as well as an opponent. This is dramatically evident in the current abortion debates in the United States and in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. In the United States, where the separation of church and state is enshrined in the constitution, powerful men are using scripture to undermine this separation and to reassert their control of women’s reproductive lives. In Iran, a self-proclaimed Islamic state, the Ayatollahs use their political and clerical authority to enforce hijab morality on the country’s women.

When the United States Supreme Court handed down the 2022 Dobbs decision, ending women’s constitutional right to abortion, the court’s majority, insisting that this constitutional right never existed, spoke in the secular language of legal discourse. They claimed that they were only transferring the issue from the federal to the state level where it belonged. Those writing for the minority were not fooled. They argued that the decision deprived women of their rights as soon as they carried a fertilized egg. State after state enacted anti-abortion laws that proved them right.

The February 2024 decision by Alabama supreme court chief justice Tom Parker exposed the religious wolf in the secular sheep’s clothing. Ruling that the IVF embryos accidentally destroyed in an IVF clinic were persons and that their destruction constituted manslaughter, he repeatedly cited Genesis and God’s wrath to argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and to insist that its laws were intended to reflect that fact. Though these embryos were in test tubes, had they been carried by a woman, their lives would take precedence over hers. His ruling in conjunction with Alabama’s anti-abortion laws uses a specific version of Christian theology to treat pregnant women as wombs.

The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) did not need the Parker decision to understand that the abortion restrictions enacted in the U.S. are attempts by certain religions to give their theology state power. NCJW argues that the idea that a fertilized egg is a person whose rights override that of the mother is at odds with Jewish theology where the rights of the mother prevail, where her life always takes precedence and the right to abortion is protected. Thus, it is not only the secular issue of the separation of church and state that is at stake but the future of the U.S. as a country that protects the rights of multiple religions to thrive. Defending their religious rights, the NCJW joined the U.S. Department of Justice case against the Texas and Kentucky abortion bans. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other Jewish and Protestant groups have used religious freedom arguments in cases in Indiana and Missouri.

Iranian women cannot call on the idea of religious freedom to contest the Ayatollahs’ hijab morality that segregates them from men, limits their movements and curtails their access to public places. Supportive of the idea of Iran as an Islamic state, they are using their interpretations of the Qur’an, supported by male moderate clerics, to denounce the gender apartheid imposed by the regime as a fundamentalist usurpation of the truth of Islam’s endorsement of women’s equality. This denunciation found its public expression in the 16 September 2022 demonstrations protesting the death of Masha Anini after being arrested by the morality police for violating the veiling edits. What began as a demonstration against the hijab grew into a massive revolt against the regime accompanied by chants of “death to the dictators”. Protesting under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, these women and men revolutionaries recognized what women’s rights advocates have said from the very beginning. Women’s rights are human rights. A threat to women’s freedom threatens us all. The ruling clerics have squelched the rebellion. The rejection of its fundamentalist version of Islam continues to simmer (Bergoffen 2023, pp. 71–92).

Whether they are framed as an argument between secular and religious understandings of women’s place in the world, as a dispute between fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts and other readings, or as a matter of different religious theologies, this much seems clear: the anxiety about our identity is real. It can be assuaged by providing men and women secure places in the world. When this security comes at the price of women’s subordination to men and/or at the price of being confined in identities that are alienating the bargain patriarchy offers women is not worth the price, especially once these securities demand forgoing the joys of a sexed subject whose undecidability fulfills its desire to be who it wants to be (Nancy and Goh 2021, pp. 27, 31).

6. #METOO

#METOO might be heard as the voice of women refusing to pay the price of being boxed in to a sexualized identity. Its focus on sexual abuse might be seen as confirming Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that women are degraded as the sex, and as such are de-subjectified as the objects of men’s desire (Beauvoir 2010, p. 6). It might be seen as continuing Beauvoir’s project of rejecting this reduction of women as the sex to the second sex, and of lifting her feminist critique from the pages of a book to the electronics of the internet. Translating Beauvoir’s words into Cornell’s language, #METOO might be understood as exposing the ways that women have been robbed of the right to their desire—the ways that women’s desire has been appropriated by men—the normalization of men’s right to use women sexually without regard to/for women’s desire.

As Freud tells the story of the origin of civilization, this right was asserted from the very beginning. According to Freud, it is the autocratic father’s exclusive right to women, his denial of the sons’ desire, that triggers their revolt (Freud 1950). In Freud’s telling, women’s desire plays no part in the birth of civilization. As his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality make clear, however, this is not to say that women have no desire, but rather indicates that they are indifferent to the outcome of the men’s fight (Freud 1962). Whether they are the sex for one man or many matters little. They must forfeit the right to their desire.

Understood in these ways, #METOO cannot be reduced to a matter of consent. Nor can it be accused of destroying the joys of sex. As a matter of making women’s desire count, it is a matter of the patriarchal murder of sexual intimacy. It is a matter of destroying the sexual contract that sacrifices women’s bodies to the power of men’s anxieties.

7. An Ethics of the Caress

In the Afterword to The Deconstruction of Sex, Claire Colebrook credits #METOO with exposing the sexual violence of the homosocial bonding of powerful men on Wall Street, Washington and in the academy that seemed to require the traffic in women (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 83). Where #METOO is usually identified as a political movement, Colebrook moves it into ethical territory. She argues that in revealing the pervasiveness of sexual violence and demanding accountably, #METOO advocates an ethics of sex. (Colebrook 2021) Goh describes this ethics as directing us “to approach others in a sexual relation: respectfully, tactfully, sensitive to how much of our bodies to put forward before the other while at the same time keeping the forces of sexual relations in play” (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 13).

I read Sartre’s account of the caress in Being and Nothingness as a description of this ethics and of the difficulties of sustaining it. Sartre depicts the caress as a possession of the other where “possession truly appears as a double reciprocal incarnation” that is at odds with the utilization of an object (Sartre 1992, pp. 508–509). This erotic reciprocity, however, is fragile. According to Sartre’s heterosexual account, it falls prey to acts of taking and penetrating in the service of reproduction (Sartre 1992, p. 510). Rather than dismissing the caress as foreplay, the first act to what is really wanted in sex, the climax, Sartre finds that the “natural end” to the caress “brings about the rupture of the reciprocity of incarnation which was precisely the unique goal of desire” (Sartre 1992, p. 517).

Following Sartre’s description of this contest between the goal of desire, the caress, and the reproductive demands of nature, the climax cuts a path to Nancy, who, in denaturalizing sex, humanizes it. Nancy describes sex as an opening to an intimacy where pleasure is less important than the secret of this intimacy (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 65). This secret, he says, is revealed in the relationship between a body open to the caress, open to being touched by another who explores the depth of its sensuality, and a body that probes without breaking open or wounding their flesh (Nancy and Goh 2021, p. 37). If we need Nancy to foreground the erotic ethics of Sartre’s account of the caress, we need Sartre to remind us that in making ourselves available to the caress, in risking the vulnerability of our desire, we cannot guarantee that we will escape being broken, or wounded.

Watching the floating signifier of the human transform the autonomous subject of human rights to an intersubjective desiring subject is to watch both the transformation of the body that is recognized as human and to see the body in a new light. Always understood as enveloped in a skin that individuates us, an individuation taken to the extreme in the idea of autonomy, the body that sets us apart from others must now also be seen as an inter-corporeal body—a porous tissue that, feeling the touch of another, makes the human worlds of love and caring possible. Inter-corporeal intersubjectivity transforms natural demands for survival cooperation into human desires for intimacy. It transforms the hollow intersubjectivity of instrumental relationships into an intersubjectivity of sensuous wonder—a sensuality that, as we shall see, opens us to the touch of and feel for the other-than-human lives that surround us. It means that discourses of rights, human or otherwise, must intertwine arguments for their necessity with appeals to the empathy that transforms the feared, despised or alienating other into a being I can live with and care about.

8. Recalibrating the Compass of Rights

When women dethroned the autonomous man and rejected his asserted right to oppress those whose otherness he degraded, they focused on the ways that patriarchal ideologies dehumanized women as “the sex”. Turning their victimization as “the sex” on its head, women created a human rights contract of embodiment that ennobled the intersubjective vulnerabilities of sexual desire and its expressive singularities. They found those who violated this contract guilty of human rights crimes. Re-writing the meaning of the sexual difference, women provided principles for critiquing all assertions of autonomy that transform the fact of difference into judgments of worth/worthiness. So far, these principles have been applied in an inter-species human rights context. Living in an age that some are calling the Anthropocene, where our actions determine the fate of the planet and its other-than-human species as well as that of our human species, we are compelled, I think, to open women’s critique of the autonomous subject to other claims of autonomy that continue to infect our actions. The claim at issue here is that of species autonomy.

In what follows, I argue that the ideas of inter-corporeal vulnerability and the sexual body, understood as one dimension of the sensual body, crucial to women’s affirmation of the intersubjectivity of the subject, provide tools for critiquing claims of species autonomy and the exploitive practices it enables. As these ideas led women to reconfigure the subject of rights from an authoritarian autonomous subject to one that lives the dignity of its singularity among a community of different but equal others, they can now lead us to bring the idea of rights into inter-species territory. Here, the sensuality of the body plays a crucial role in attuning us to the dignity of other-than-human beings, and to showing us how to create humane ways of living with those who are radically different.

In other times, this turn to inter-species rights might be dismissed as an academic affair. Today, it cannot. There is nothing academic about the threat of climate change and species extinction. Ed Yong describes this age as “a geological epoch defined and dominated by the deeds of our species. We have changed the climate and acidified the oceans by releasing titanic accounts of greenhouse gases. We have shuffled wildlife across continents, replacing indigenous species with invasive ones. We have instituted what some scientists have called an era of biological annihilation” (Yong 2023, p. 336). Though, as recently reported in the New York Times, some geologists reject the term Anthropocene to describe the current geological era, they do not dispute the fact that we are responsible for the current environmental and species crisis. Whatever term we choose to describe this crisis, the fact remains that having frayed the fabric of the world, we are responsible for mending it.

Technological innovations and the political will to implement them are essential to fixing the damage. Unless these fixes are guided by a rights mindset, however, they risk setting us on courses of action that, in preserving the future of the human species, threaten our survival as a humane species.

Twentieth century human rights documents, speaking of our responsibility to establish a human rights culture in terms of the responsibility of the witness to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, provide this mindset. The earth and its other-than-human species, like the voiceless victims of human rights atrocities, cannot contest their vulnerability to our power. They need our voice of conscience to speak for them. As witnesses to their fate, it is our duty to speak in their name. As the voice of our conscience, this witnessing turns the utilitarian justification of protecting the life of the earth and its other species as necessary to/for our survival toward recognizing the singular modes of dignity of these strange other-than-human lives. This turning is not a matter of choosing one justification for another but of ensuring that neither excludes the other.

Re-signifying the subject of rights to include other-than-human lives moves the idea of the right to life to center stage without erasing the importance of the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rather, it brings human rights issues into climate change discussions. It turns our attention to the ways that the impacts of environmental dangers such as pollution and climate disasters such as floods and hurricanes are unequally distributed. Some suffer more than others, not because environmental forces target certain communities rather than others but because human prejudices and institutions determine who gets immediate help and who does not, who lives near polluting factories and who does not, who has access to uncontaminated water and who does not. Though broken intra- and interspecies bonds require different institutional and practical repair practices, they cannot be severed from each other. In both cases, whether adequate repair practices are put in place will be determined by how the question: Whose life is valued/valuable is answered.

Women’s experience and strategies show how a human and species rights answer to this question might emerge. Where Wollstonecraft, caught in the paradigm of her times, found that in relying on the equality of souls to secure rights for women, she could not address the ways that assaults on women’s bodies destroyed their humanity, feminists coming after her changed the rules of the game. Moving the dignity of the person from the rational soul/mind to the integrity of the body, they made rape and other forms of violence against women human rights crimes. In centering our humanity in the body, they raised, at least, two questions. What is the body? How is embodiment integral to our humanity? As we have seen, the answers to these questions did not come all at once. They are still emerging. I have used the phrase inter-corporeal vulnerability to indicate how we are currently answering these questions within a human rights context and turn to them to argue for a more expansive idea of the subject of rights—one that points to our entanglement with other species.

I begin by returning to Nancy’s idea of a skin body. Nancy describes the skin as an organ that makes an organism visible and recognizable. It presents a body to other bodies, and in this presentation, exposes itself to all possible outsides. As a site of exposure, it is a site of vulnerability and relationships, sensitivity, activity, passivity, and expressivity. It is a place of transport, traffic, and transaction (Nancy 2021b, pp. 87–89).

The skin body directs us to think of this traffic and these transactions as guided by a distinct body that, as immersed in and desirous of relationships, exposes itself and makes itself vulnerable to those who respond to its appeal. Confining his account of the skin body to its implications for human relationships, Nancy finds that its sexuality promises to reveal the secret of human intimacy. I move Nancy’s focus on the sexuality of the skin body to its sensuality to bring the experience of embodiment into inter-species territory.

Turning in this direction and turning to Sy Montgomery’s descriptions of her relationships with octopuses (Montgomery 2015) and Ed Yong’s accounts of the ways that other animals perceive the world (Yong 2023) reveals that, like the sexuality that reveals the promise of human intimacy, the sensuality that attunes us to the sights, sounds and fragrances of other life forms promises to disclose some of the secrets of their worlds.

Montgomery describes her book The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness as an exploration of the “great mystery of the Other” (Montgomery 2015, p. 4). She says that she wanted “to touch an alternative reality” (Montgomery 2015, p. 4). She is not being metaphorical when she uses the word touch, for it is by immersing her arm in “the shockingly cold 47-degree Fahrenheit water” that is the home of the octopus and feeling its suction that she experiences its strangeness (Montgomery 2015, p. 4). Athena is the first of the many octopuses that Montgomery meets. Like Nancy, who describes each human being as a singularity, Montgomery discovers that no two octopuses are alike. Each has a distinct “personality”. Each affects her differently. Quoting the naturalist Henry Beston, who writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings but beings gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices that we shall never hear”, Montgomery says that Athena “was an individual that I liked very much—and also a portal leading me to thinking…imagining what other minds might be like…enticing me to explore in a way I had never had before my own planet” (Montgomery 2015, p. 13). This portal is opened by the relationship between two sensuous bodies. Montgomery does not/cannot claim to know what this opening means to Athena and the other octopuses she encounters. What she does know is that their suctions are benevolent. They allow her to meet them in their otherness and to respect them for who they are.

Ed Yong encounters other species through the work of scientists who study the ways that other-than-human beings sense the world. Where Immanual Kant introduced us to the idea that the world we know is filtered through the categories of the mind and as such renders the world in itself unknowable to us, Yong draws on the Baltic-German zoologist Jacob Uexküll’s idea of an Umwelt, the distinct sensory bubbles through which different species are constrained and liberated in their experience of the world, to counter the belief that the world we know embraces all that there is to know about the world (Yong 2023, pp. 4–7).

Though Yong does not/cannot engage his senses to encounter these other worlds, he finds that we are not entirely closed off from exploring them. Acknowledging that it will not be easy, he shows how the work of scientists provides ways of stepping into other Umwelten (Yong 2023, p. 12). In speaking of the integrity of diverse Unwelten, Yong raises the price of our destructive behaviors, for he finds that in destroying and/or degrading the lives of other species, we are creating a homogenous world bereft of “the wonderous variety of animal Umwelten” (Yong 2023, p. 147).

Yong does not use the language of rights to critique the impact of our disregard for the fate of other species. Yet, in going beyond collecting the writings of scientists who work in the area of animal perception to discuss how this work nurtures our respect for these other ways of being in the world, and in describing how this respect directs us to find practical solutions to preserving lives and worlds that are strange to us, he gives us a model for how a dialogue between those engaged in finding technological solutions to our current situation and those who look for a rights-empathetic approach might proceed.

I use the phrase “recalibrating the compass of rights” to provide the horizon for this conversation. Working within this horizon requires that though neither party rejects the perspective of the other, both reject claims of species autonomy. For technocrats, abandoning these claims tempers the drive for efficient, instrumental solutions with a desire to ensure the humaneness of their solutions. For species rights advocates, this means accepting the fact that instrumental uses of other species, though sometimes necessary, do not necessarily constitute an assault on their integrity. We have found ways to use each other as workers, for example, without violating each other’s dignity. Whether we speak of this conversation as guided by the humaneness of technical practices or the integrity of those affected by them, as conducted under the horizon of recalibrating the compass of rights, it will necessarily entail attention to the issue of human rights understood as intersubjective inter-corporeal rights—to the ways that today’s ecological crises exasperate the social, economic and political vulnerabilities that existed long before we became responsible for the vulnerability of the planet.

The case for reversing the impact of environmental degradation is clear. Effective ways of doing this are also emerging, using cork to replace plastics, for example. The political will to effect these changes is another story. Here, inaction and chaos prevail. I do not have the expertise to take up these technical and political issues. The best I can offer are ideas, a belief in the power of ideas, and the hope that these ideas can motivate us to create civic, social, and political worlds that reject the idea of autonomy (species and individual) and the destructive values it nourishes. There is no guarantee that these ideas will take hold. But following the lead of the women who used them to affirm their right to be treated with dignity, I bring them into interspecies territory in the hope that, in affirming the integrity of other-than-human species, they might lead us to transform our sense of ourselves as having dominion over the earth for one that sees us as stewards of its bounty and the multiple lives it nurtures.