Legal rights frameworks require rigid categorical boundaries that flexible ontologies cannot accommodate

Evidence

Wise wants the partition between humans and nonhumans to be flexible, but he cannot do without it. He does not employ the notion of overlapping and intrinsically differentiated networks because human rights law seems to require mutually exclusive categories (human/nonhuman, guilty/not guilty, legal person/nonperson). The assumption is that to qualify for rights “they” must be sufficiently like “us”—and conversely, that if they are too unlike us, they cannot be redeemed. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 755

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes Asad’s broader critique that liberal-secular legal categories force mutually exclusive identities, parallel to how Cooper describes the exclusionary either-or framing.
• DEEPTHINKING: The observation that legal rights frameworks structurally require the very rigid exclusions they purport to overcome is a dense, paradigm-leaning point.