Del antropocentrismo jurídico a la biodignidad: bases para reconocer derechos fundamentales a los seres vivos no humanos

Contemporary law still classifies non-human living beings as appropriable property, even though biology and cognitive science have documented in them capacities —sentience, learning, social life— that legal systems themselves invoke to justify the protection of human beings. This essay examines that tension and argues that recognising fundamental rights for non-human living beings is not a metaphorical extrapolation but the coherent continuation of a normative trajectory already under way. Through documentary review of legislation, case law and scholarship from nine jurisdictions, the paper reconstructs the path leading from indirect protection —the animal shielded as someone else’s property, or as a matter of human sensibility— to the recognition of rights-holding in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, New Zealand, Switzerland and India. On that basis it proposes a three-pillar architecture: the right to existence and to the regeneration of vital cycles; the right to ecological due process, understood as procedural standing exercised through representation or guardianship; and the right to equal consideration of comparable interests, which requires not identical treatment but a reasoned justification for any differential treatment. The essay addresses the four principal objections —absence of agency, conflict between entitlements, practical unworkability and dilution of the concept of a subjective right— and concludes that none is decisive, although each delimits the realistic scope of the proposal.