In this paper, I ask whether we can weigh and balance indigenous cosmovision—the reasoning used as the main source of legitimacy in some rights of nature legislation—within a secular legal system. I examine three barriers that rights of nature and their corollary spiritual reasoning are likely to encounter if they are invoked in secular courts: (a) spiritual reasoning is non-defeasible (Part 3) and (b) irrational (Part 4), and (3) the current concept of human rights as a universal legal norm is based on a circular logic (Part 5). In order to overcome these barriers, I draw inspiration from Dworkin’s ‘rights as trumps’ thesis and the proportionality principle (5.2), and propose that for rights of nature and their spiritual connotation to be operational in a secular court, we need to create an exception—a meta rule for these legal concepts—and subject them to the proportionality principle
