Diachronic Rights

Human rights are often said to be unsuitable to protect a range of important interests set back by climate change due to their individualistic, temporal, or anthropocentric limitations. To overcome these limitations, it is argued that rights need to be granted to a broader set of right holders including collectives, future generations or nature as a whole (or at least some parts of it). Although the focus on right holders is an important avenue for rethinking the concept of rights, it falls short of questioning the normative foundations of human rights; that is, what is it that these rights protect. In this paper, I undertake such questioning by attempting to develop a concept of diachronic rights. The concept relates to the temporal dimension of the interests that are protected by human rights. I contend that a great deal of theory as well as practice of human rights assumes what some philosophers term temporal individualism (J. O’Neill 1993; Scheffler 2021). In its essence, temporal individualism amounts to taking a short-term perspective on the individual interests by presupposing a separation between past, present, and future generations. In the context of human rights, temporal individualism has significant implications as it allows the interests of the members of the present generation to take priority over the interests of future generations (Gardiner 2013). Temporal individualism, however, need not be taken for granted as it presupposes a particular metaphysical account of personhood. This account has already been questioned and arguments have been made in favor of a wider conception of personhood according to which personhood extends beyond individual biological boundaries to encompass the concern for both past and future generations (Heyd 1992; Meyer 1997). The wider conception of personhood presupposes that individual interests have a diachronic dimension. As such, it can have important implications for rethinking human rights. A preliminary thought is that at least some human rights are diachronic (such as the right to a clean and healthy environment) and as such do not lend themselves to intergenerational conflicting claims in the way other rights do. Therefore, the concept of diachronic rights may serve as a useful tool to rethink a hierarchy of human rights in the context of climate change.