The Rights of (Future) Humans Qua Humans

Human rights are rights held ‘simply in virtue of humanity’. In unpacking this claim, it becomes apparent that theories of human rights disclose (i) something about what we understand a minimally decent human life to be, and (ii) who we consider to belong within a community of rights-bearers. In this article I reflect on the implications of these two points for future human beings and environmental human rights. I address two inter-related questions: When and why do future persons have standing as rights-bearing members of a shared moral community? Are the rights held by future generations best expressed in the ‘greening’ of existing rights, or in a new distinctly environmental right? Given that human rights express both a sense of a minimally decent life, and thus, implicitly, a vision of what it is to be a human, I argue that human rights theorists miss an important element of the human qua human if they take ecological embeddedness to be contingently rather than necessarily relevant to human rights. I therefore argue that there are reasons to favour a new distinctly environmental human right.