Mary Warnock's Challenges to Rights of Nature: Accepting Interests, but Not Rights, of Nature

Abstract

Rights of nature (RoN) is an emerging legal tool for strengthening nature conservation, receiving increased scholarly attention and finding its way into domestic legislation. RoN is an innovation in legal thinking often justified with ethical arguments and concepts such as ‘intrinsic value’ or ‘interests’. But there are many challenges with justifying RoN based on such concepts which are rarely considered by RoN advocates, blocking the formulation of stronger arguments. Based on Mary Warnock's discussion of RoN, here I investigate two related claims: (1) that environmental entities can be said to have interests, but (2) while this means that they have moral status, it does not justify concluding that they are rights-holders. By way of critical engagement, I put Warnock's discussion in contact with scholarship on RoN and the scope and grounds of rights, scholarship that has expanded since Warnock's engagement with the concept. Warnock's observations are attentive to the relevance of concepts such as intrinsic value and interests to the environment, but also to their limits, in ways that can benefit RoN scholarship.