Law, rooted in culture, views individuals as if each one can be parsed from its earthly matrix, decontextualized from its social, biological or ecological context. It may seem less complicated—or less consequential—to manage property or people this way, but it’s not real. A nation, for all the borders it throws up to separate and validate itself, is no more autonomous than a caveman. Legalities cannot camouflage interdependence or vulnerability. None of it conforms to biology or deep time or ecological metaphysics. A state is not an individual any more than an individual is a state.
National sovereignty is a throwback to interminable and highly destructive European wars of the 17th century, driven by religious fervor, territorial imperatives and plain lust for power. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) subordinated religious intolerance and imperialist designs to territorial integrity and security, the right to control movement within territorial borders, with prohibitions against violent incursions into neighboring states. The Westphalian delusion of non-intervention dies today in the UN Charter, which ineffectually decries military cross-border intrusions while largely ignoring the legal significance of decades of ecological interventions spreading drought, floods, typhoons, displacement and death from afar. The UN has also been hobbled from its inception by hypocritical claims of universal sovereign equality. This is a joke that has never been funny.
Justice begins with acknowledging universal equality and vulnerability. There are scores of legal vulnerabilities or circumstances of victimization. Virtually every legal case addresses some version of competing vulnerabilities. However, the principle of universal (including planetary) vulnerability is not incorporated into jurisprudence. This is why rulings that recognize the vulnerability of Earth to the acts of men establish new ground. If vulnerability was integrated into jurisprudence, law would have to acknowledge connection; it would have to feel. But law is not designed to feel. Law is designed to operate independently of feeling, fearing that a recognition of vulnerability or empathy would contaminate its illusory objectivity.
Law is also insufficient because it presumes permanence can be imposed on what is inherently impermanent. In this scheme, vulnerability is granted a narrow definition as anyone ‘subjected to a danger of being harmed or of suffering.’ Actual harm is central to law, and law could stand to expand it, but there is no predication that everyone is inherently vulnerable. Instead, law postures as neutral while it tolerates radically asymmetrical vulnerability. In a world unraveling under systemic harm, instead of law becoming a breathing gesture of response-ability, empathy is considered a liability.
Empathy makes no inroads into legal positivism. Neither is planetary vulnerability recognized as an ontological condition. Law requires that the fiction of the individual be sustained and that the voices driving the construction and administration of law, on balance, do not weigh universal vulnerabilities of the personal, social, global or especially the ecological context because the metabolic health of the Earth system does not factor into its deliberations. Law can think locally, but globally? Not so much. Law is consistent in this respect.
The source of vulnerability is the ecosystem and the body itself. Bodies of all kinds are vulnerable by virtue of being alive. Human bodies are or become vulnerable not solely because of age or infirmity but because social and natural environments are interactive and we are inevitably affected by actions of others. The social commitments we make to account for shared vulnerability are like tensional cables that sustain form, equalizing responsibility across all members, distributing sustainability between people and institutions. The character of adjudication within this configuration must account for vulnerabilities at multiple scales. But since law does not currently recognize universal vulnerability, ethics becomes a casualty of law. The very existence of resilience arises from physical and social vulnerability. In this era of deepening planetary disturbance, the denial of vulnerability reduces resilience.
Consider that your own vulnerability is essential to realizing kinship. Imagine the state dismissing your vulnerability—or not even recognizing it. How is it that the preservation of life is not a founding principle of law? Is it because modernity does not regard all life as equally deserving of protection? Check. Are some bodies less deserving of life than others? Check. Colonial history still echoes in law, still serves systemic hierarchies and continues to sanction the remote violence of ecological destruction and social dislocation.
Law treats vulnerability as a weakness, as a cost to be externalized, as an exception to autonomy, freedom and invulnerability. Acknowledging inherent vulnerability would establish a basis for responsive relationship, mutual accountability, muddying sovereignty and property claims by expanding the meaning and scope of care across all boundaries. Such a principle is entirely unacceptable to the neoliberal. Since capital denies a world-as-subject, it upholds the ontology of other. Neoliberalism is thus anti-relational. It attempts to control who relates and on what terms. Current antipathy to the institutions of social safety is not really intended to restrain government spending as it claims. Support for social safety is an acknowledgment of vulnerability based on empathy. To acknowledge one’s own vulnerability requires a recognition of universal vulnerability.
How different would an empathic civilization be? And yet, there is a long factual record showing that powerless individuals are preyed upon because of their vulnerability. As such, we have substantive violations of one of the foundational premises of secular law in liberal societies—that all persons (and let’s include ecologies) are to be treated equally. When jurists consistently provide greater access to law to select groups or when equal access is denied, they themselves undermine the rule of law, the responsibilities of relationship and ethical standards. When equal access to the law becomes just a theory, popular sentiment sours on the use of courts as protection from abuse. Cases are not brought; abuse is not recognized, recourse is denied. Harm continues.
By ignoring vulnerability, modern institutions deny the relational because the effect is not contained, it is general. The future is discounted. By placing corporate rights over human or ecological welfare, law poisons popular confidence in its practice. As the extractive economy refuses to face vulnerability, the planet becomes disposable. Even humans who don’t reflect standard biological normativity become disposable. To become a true instrument of care, law would occupy the niche between people and planet, between capital and planet, between collective well-being and sovereignty, balancing their omnidirectional tensions. That would be a step toward reclaiming universal relationship, an Earth-centric vision, with a sensitivity to the meaning of safety. True safety—rooted in a recognition of vulnerability—would require law to attune to relational needs instead of being a shield of power. The current legal application of safety is the safety of the already secure.
The triumvirate of law, property and sovereignty is not a structure of care. As structural elements of culture, its lines are drawn to prevent rupture or collapse. A relational fire now burns through the fictions they uphold, reminding us that control is not safety, that boundaries do not define belonging, and that scripture does not define value. Even in the face of deepening social and planetary vulnerability, the capacity of law to reverse itself is more difficult, not less, because it is subordinate to the economy.
The propagation of vulnerability is thus an enduring feature of the judicial system, like any another cost externalized. If law were ever to hold universal care as a principle, it would no longer center around punishment. It would instead become a force of rebalancing living systems—a means of healing rupture, reweaving the social fabric, and attending to wounds that bleed across people, species, and generations.
In the current worldview, rooted in enclosure, scarcity, individualism and human-centered entitlement, the safety of all suffers. In a rights-based framework, safety becomes a mutual responsibility, an obligation that transcends the human to include the biosphere. Even turning the Rights of Nature movement toward centering safety as a shared response to common vulnerability (instead of a right to be excluded from all wrongs) would imply a union of the human and natural world under a common obligation.
Safety is the reduction of risk; and there’s no shortage of risk to be addressed in the expansive designs of capital. But it is more than that. If vulnerability is our primal condition, then safety is our birthright. A system that breeds risk, capitalizes on risk, that exploits vulnerability, that refuses to look at the rationale for the risk it propagates, creates an unsafe world.
In a non-dual framework of governance, global deliberations would not devolve into competing versions of scarcity or be overridden by claims of sovereignty. There would be no concept of non-cooperation or national obstruction, or even of a nation that would exclusively pursue its own extractive ends at the expense of the commons. There would be no such thing as the current pace of extraction because global relations would be focused on developing bioregional priorities, finding ways to distribute (and recycle) resources more thoroughly and equitably. The face of relational intelligence arises in inquisitive and reflective rituals, accommodating all views, weaving in principles of mutually assured sanctuary, arriving at tensional balance instead of legislating against harm.
A non-dual world system would share vulnerability by co-regulating risk, judiciously distributing it equitably, always looking for new ways to reduce it systemically. Safety and risk then become relational, expressed as the creation of sanctuary not for the few, but for the many. In other words, vulnerability is the ground on which relational accountability becomes justice. There is no rightto capitalize on it, no right to offload risk to the planet for exclusive human benefit. Sanctuary is also not a static condition. It is a floating consciousness, settled without being inert, actively remaining in touch with the one body of the world.
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