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

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.