Humanity’s Collective Ownership of the Earth and Immigration

In my 2012 book On Global Justice, I argued that humanity’s collective ownership of the earth should be central to reflection on the permissibility of immigration. Other philosophers have recently offered accounts of immigration that do without the kind of global standpoint provided by collective ownership. I argue here that all these attempts fail. But once we see how humanity’s collective ownership of the earth can deliver a genuinely global standpoint on immigration, we must also consider two alternative ways of offering such a standpoint. First, some have argued that any given generation should be regarded as inheriting both the natural and the societal wealth of humanity. The second alternative invokes ethno-geographic communities characterized by particular land-use patterns. This approach would deliver a global standpoint on immigration by determining which community gets to select the land-use pattern for a given location. I argue that thinking about immigration from the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth is superior to both of those alternatives. While advancing a standpoint from which to think about questions of immigration/migration, this article also offers explanations to situate its themes in the current philosophical debate and cover quite a range of topics in the debate about immigration. No prior acquaintance with On Global Justice is presupposed here

Securing Human Rights Intellectually: Philosophical Inquiries about the Universal Declaration

This article is intended for an edited volume in the series "The New Harvard Bookshelf: Towards a Liberal Education for the 21st Century." The purpose of that collection is to bring together articles that capture the basic ideas of various courses offered in the general education curriculum of Harvard College. This article is based on the syllabus of my course Human Rights: A Philosophical Introduction (ER11). It begins with a brief historical introduction to the human rights movement and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the main goal of this article is to explore three different approaches to arguing that human beings have rights in virtue of being human. I conclude with a few remarks on the universalism/relativism debate.

Global Justice

Increasing political and economic interconnectedness draws much philosophical attention to the question of the conditions under which such stringent claims arise. Do claims of justice arise only among those who share membership in a state? Alternatively, do they arise among all those who are jointly subject to the global political and economic order? Or do they apply among all human beings simply because they are human? Inquiries into global justice differ from those into international justice precisely by not limiting inquiry to what states should do. They may well also question the very moral acceptability of states, and explore alternative arrangements. This article surveys the recent philosophical debate on global justice.

Immigration, Ethics and the Capabilities Approach

Often, immigration debates are conducted under the presumption that immigration policies must be justifiable only to those who already live in the respective country. Alas, reflection on the justifiability of immigration policies to those excluded becomes ever more important in a politically and economically increasingly interconnected world. This study explores two approaches to the normative reflection on immigration at some depth, namely, the idea that restrictive immigration policies are problematic because they are hampering the development of human capabilities, as well as the idea that such policies are problematic because they are at odds with the fact that our planet belongs to humanity collectively. On both of these proposals, less restrictive immigration policies are not merely demanded as one possible way of aiding the poor, but would be required as such. Both of these approaches can be treated within the same framework, the grounds-of-justice framework, which allows us to focus on the idea that states must also be justified to those who do not belong to them. Central to the proposal about immigration that can be made within this approach are ideas of over- and under-use of commonly owned resources and spaces.Immigration, justice, capabilities, common ownership of the earth, resources

Original Ownership of the Earth: A Contemporary Approach

That humanity collectively owns the earth was the guiding idea of 17th century political philosophy, which was partly a reflection of the increasing concern with questions of global reach at that time. The basis for that standpoint was mostly religious. However, the view that the earth originally belongs to humankind collectively is plausible without religious input. Since political philosophy is once again preoccupied with questions of global reach, we have much to gain from revitalizing the standpoint of original collective ownership. This essay explores the view that the earth belongs to humankind collectively from a contemporary, secular standpoint. My goal is twofold: First of all, to offer a particular view on the ownership status of the earth; and second, to defend this inquiry into original ownership against objections. I hope to stimulate more research into these matters that are of such striking importance to contemporary political philosophy with its focus on global justice. The standpoint of collective ownership could generate a fruitful research agenda, one that, among other things, allows us to discuss questions pertaining to immigration, human rights, obligations to future generations, and global climate change.

Global Justice

Increasing political and economic interconnectedness draws much philosophical attention to the question of the conditions under which such stringent claims arise. Do claims of justice arise only among those who share membership in a state? Alternatively, do they arise among all those who are jointly subject to the global political and economic order? Or do they apply among all human beings simply because they are human? Inquiries into global justice differ from those into international justice precisely by not limiting inquiry to what states should do. They may well also question the very moral acceptability of states, and explore alternative arrangements. This article surveys the recent philosophical debate on global justice

Securing Human Rights Intellectually: Philosophical Inquiries about the Universal Declaration

This article is intended for an edited volume in the series "The New Harvard Bookshelf: Towards a Liberal Education for the 21st Century." The purpose of that collection is to bring together articles that capture the basic ideas of various courses offered in the general education curriculum of Harvard College. This article is based on the syllabus of my course Human Rights: A Philosophical Introduction (ER11). It begins with a brief historical introduction to the human rights movement and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the main goal of this article is to explore three different approaches to arguing that human beings have rights in virtue of being human. I conclude with a few remarks on the universalism/relativism debate

A Précis of On Global Justice, With Emphasis on Implications for International Institutions

The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit the applicability of justice to states or else extend it to all human beings. The view I defend rejects both these approaches and instead recognizes different considerations or conditions based on which individuals are in the scope of different principles of justice. Finding a philosophically convincing alternative to those approaches strikes me as the most demanding and important challenge contemporary political philosophy faces (one that in turn reflects the significance of the political issues that are at stake). My own view, and thus my attempt at meeting this challenge, acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. This book seeks to present a foundational theory that makes it plausible that there could be multiple grounds of justice and to defend a specific view of the grounds that I call pluralist internationalism. Pluralist Internationalism grants particular normative relevance to the state but qualifies this relevance by embedding the state into other grounds that are associated with their own principles of justice and that thus impose additional obligations on those who share membership in a state. The grounds that I discuss are shared membership in a state; common humanity; shared membership in the global order; shared involvement with the global trading system; and humanity’s collective ownership of the earth. (It is probably in the conceptualization of common ownership as a ground of justice that my view seems strangest.) Within this theory one must explore what obligations of justice pertain to states and other institutions. International institutions must be understood as agents of justice (rather than as entities that merely advance particular state interests). Moreover, it is international organizations or other entities of global administrative law that most plausibly create the context in which states give account to noncitizens for their contributions to justice

Who Should Shoulder the Burden? Global Climate Change and Common Ownership of the Earth

A common and intuitively plausible approach to thinking about the distributional questions that arise about global climate change is that the atmosphere is a "global sink" whose use is subject to regulation in terms of an equal-per-capita principle: Each person should have the same entitlement to pollute. This view, however, is plausible only if one thinks the earth as a whole belongs in some sense to humanity as such. This essay develops that standpoint of collective ownership of the earth and applies it to the aforementioned distributional questions. In light of that standpoint some of the ethical dimensions of global climate change take on a particular shape. It turns out, however, that the philosophically most plausible understanding of collective ownership of the earth does not support an equal-per-capita principle, not does it support certain versions of a principle of accountability for past emissions. Instead, we end up with a combination of "polluter pays" and "ability to pay" principles to the regulation of access to the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere into whose precise formulation certain aspects of historical accountability will, however, also enter.