After Dignity, Habitability: The Law’s Next Cardinal Value

Morizot and Neyret locate the weakness of environmental law above its rules, in what it has never named.

Environmental law has more rules than almost any field, and far less force. Treaties, codes, principles, agencies, decades of litigation, and still the nagging sense that the machinery slips on the real at the very moment the real starts to tip. After COP21, a jurist and a philosopher set out to find why, and stayed on the question for ten years. Their answer, in the 2026 Tract Liberté, dignité, habitabilité¹ (Gallimard’s series of short pamphlets), is that the weakness sits under the rules rather than in them. The field has procedures, sanctions, technical principles. What it has never had is a value at the top that could say, in one line, what deserves protection.

That missing piece has a name in legal theory, a protected value, a valeur protégée². It is the reference at the summit, the fixed point a society uses to read its whole system of rules and to justify binding its own power.

We already live with two of them. Liberty is a protected value. So is equality. These are working parts of the law, not decoration. Liberty is the test that makes arbitrary power illegitimate, and it runs through public law, criminal law, free speech, free movement, free association. Equality forbids rank by birth and forces every difference of treatment to explain itself.

A protected value is the base of the building. Not a magic fix, but the foundation that lets the structure hold when the weather turns.

Criminal law is where you see a protected value at work. Every sentence, a fine or a prison term, takes away a citizen’s liberty, and liberty is itself a protected value. You may touch one protected value only in the name of another.

Take torture first. The law stops you from torturing, and restricts your freedom to act, in the name of human dignity. Value against value. The scale balances, and we feel no injustice, without even having to think about it.

Now the harder case. The law stops you spraying pesticides next to a spring, restricting the freedom to use your own land, in the name of what? The official answer, protection of the environment, is administrative, technical, regulatory. There is no value of equal rank standing behind it. The scale tips, and the restriction feels like harassment.

The rule is simple: you infringe a value only in the name of another value. A society that has not named what it holds dear cannot ask anyone to sacrifice for it.

So this is, before it is a legal argument, an argument about justice. The ecological transition asks for real renunciations. They can only be lived as fair if the value they serve has first been consecrated.

Their candidate is habitability, the set of conditions that keep the Earth liveable for life, the capacity of the living world to go on producing a world we can inhabit. Name it at that height, and the fight between the economy and the environment does not vanish, any more than liberty and dignity stopped colliding after 1945. It becomes a conflict between two recognised values, the kind a court can actually weigh, instead of a sacred liberty pitted against a constraint that looks arbitrary. A legal order can only balance values it has agreed to treat as fundamental, and on the environmental side that second value is still missing.

A sharper objection turns the values themselves into the problem. Everyone has them, they never converge, and when two collide there is no criterion to rank them. But the law has never owned a master criterion and has never needed one. It handles clashing values through proportionality, the case-by-case weighing of one against another. In Robert Alexy’s terms, constitutional principles are optimisation requirements, realised as far as possible alongside one another rather than ranked once and for all.³ The objection also proves too much, since liberty and equality collide with no fixed order, and constitutional law has lived with that for two centuries. Recognising habitability would not settle its conflict with the economy. It would make that conflict a fair fight, two acknowledged weights on the scale instead of a regulatory feather against a constitutional ingot.

Why the gap exists is a matter of timing. Law was built slowly, crisis by crisis, in centuries when no economy could threaten the planet’s habitability and none imagined it ever might. The biologist Edward Wilson put it in one line, that our real problem is that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.⁴ The cathedral was drawn before the danger existed. The centuries enshrined liberty, equality, dignity. They never enshrined habitability.⁵

The precedent for what they are asking is close and almost crushing: human dignity. After 1945, facing crimes that broke the moral and legal imagination, the age wrote into law a value that had until then stayed implicit. Robert Jackson, opening Nuremberg, warned that civilisation could not survive such crimes being repeated. The Charter of 8 August 1945 created a new category, crimes against humanity, and with it something became sayable that had not been before, a problem the law could finally pose to itself.

To name is to arm the future against its own temptations. Robert Badinter, in a Constitutional Council deliberation, put it plainly: it is good, against tomorrow’s temptations, to enshrine the safeguard of dignity.

And recognition can run far ahead of conduct. The states that enshrined dignity in 1948 were not innocent of indignity. The United States still enforced racial segregation. France and Britain still held colonies. The value was written down by societies that broke it daily. That is the point, not an embarrassment to it. Once dignity was named, segregation and empire had a standard turned against them, and the people fighting both could say the law was now on their side. Naming a value can prepare a shift long before a society is ready to live it.

The obvious objection is that dignity has not stopped genocide, so what use is it. It confuses a failure to apply a value with the value being useless, and it misses two jobs a protected value does. As a hand, dignity tries to stop a given crime, and geopolitics can tie that hand. As an eye, dignity lets a civilisation see, and this is the part that matters most. It pulls a society out of moral blindness, lets it tell the human from the inhuman, and it holds even when the hand is tied. The hand can be beaten in any given year. The eye is the function a century cannot do without, the collective moral compass that survives the years the hand fails.

What dignity did after 1945 was to make some justifications impossible. Before Nuremberg you could argue, in law, that a group of humans had no rights. After, that argument was unthinkable. Crimes still happen, but they must now hide, lie, or break the law in the open, which raises their cost.

Naming dignity also built things. From it came the Universal Declaration, national constitutions, regional human-rights courts, and the international criminal courts in The Hague. A protected value forbids, and it also creates the institutions that carry it.

We are blind today in a similar way. The law treats it all as normal. Wrecking the planet’s habitability, poisoning soils and water, driving the sixth extinction with close to a million species near disappearance, happens under permits and authorisations, not under prosecution.

And those species are not only what is being lost. They build the habitable world. Morizot and Neyret use a plain picture for it. Red life runs on blood and burns oxygen, the animals, us. Green life, the plants, makes the oxygen that red life burns. Each lives off what the other produces, and that exchange, repeated across millions of species, is what keeps the air breathable and the world liveable. So the value they propose protects the interdependencies between humans and the rest of the living world, the web that produces the conditions of life and therefore produces us, not nature as a thing set apart.

Naming this as a value does not stop the harm. What it removes is the harm’s banality, the assumption that it is ordinary. It turns some normal things abnormal and raises the moral and legal price of what used to pass without comment.

A jurist called the proposal a pragmatic utopia, an aim that sounds utopian but is built through patient, realistic legal work inside the law’s own constraints, and the authors take the phrase. Neyret is the lawyer whose work helped French law recognise ecological harm⁶ and toughen environmental crime, so this works inside those constraints rather than wishing them away. The movement, they argue, already exists, scattered through founding texts and climate judgments. It does not need inventing, only naming.

Set beside liberty and equality rather than dignity, the comparison changes scale. Liberty marked the eighteenth century, equality the nineteenth, dignity the twentieth. Habitability is offered as the protected value of the twenty-first.

What it would protect is the world as the shared dwelling of the living, the ground without which no dignified life is possible. The same instinct ran through the Bernardins conference I wrote up here, where the choice put to a civilisation was to build the city where we live together rather than raise another tower.

A protected value, they write, does not end harm. It ends the tranquillity of harm, the chance to do it in peace. Recognition is necessary, they are careful to add, not sufficient, because no one fights well what they have not yet named as a crime. Dignity named what must never be done to a human being. Habitability would name what must never be done to a world.