Taking up space on earth: Theorizing territorial rights, the justification of states and immigration from a global standpoint

Abstract

The author’s 2012 book On Global Justice gives pride of place to the idea that humanity collectively owns the earth. Independently, there has been a flourishing literature on the justification of rights to territory. Central to this discussion are a Kantian and a Lockean approach. This paper recapitulates the author’s approach to humanity’s collective ownership of the earth and argues that, properly understood, both of those approaches should integrate the global standpoint constituted thereby. However, the goal here is not to amend the Kantian and Lockean approaches to territory, but to refute them. To that end the paper also argues that both approaches endorse an unacceptably strong view of the justifiability of states and should therefore be rejected. The view in On Global Justice emerges vindicated, according to which territorial rights, the justification of states and immigration all need to be theorized together, and need to be theorized from a genuinely global standpoint.

Rights to the Oceans: Foundational Arguments Reconsidered

“…From this standpoint, agents can 'reasonably expect others to accept exclusion' only if the claim meets the proportionality condition. 28 This condition says that states may control only as many resources as determined by a worldwide distribution of equal individual opportunities to use resources. 29 To defend the content of the proportionality condition, Risse refers to other authors, such as John Locke, whose theory limits the acquisition of exclusive claims to modest holdings, and argues that this is a proposal to which we can assume people would agree.…”

Theorising from the Global Standpoint: Kant and Grotius on Original Common Possession of the Earth

“…The rough outlines of Grotius's account of humanity's original common ownership of the earth at hand, I now want to look at Mathias Risse's recent revival of the concept (Risse , , ), which had fallen out of fashion in political philosophy for quite some while. The turn to Risse at this point is motivated by the observation that it is in his work that we see Grotius's notion of original common ownership explicitly employed as a fundamental conceptual pillar of a theory of global justice .…”

“…Risse instead explicitly identifies a ‘universally acceptable, non‐parochial standpoint’ (Risse : 22) in Grotius's needs‐based framework, a standpoint he takes to be ideally suited to adjudicate an array of issues of global concern—including questions of resources, territory, immigration and environment. Very much in line with the sentiment of contemporary global justice debates, the need to theorise from such a standpoint is said to arise from a twofold empirical development: humanity is, in a globalised economy, increasingly interconnected, while at the same time confronting more and more problems that ‘concern our way of dealing with the earth as a whole’ (Risse : 84). Risse's revival thus allows us to connect the Grotian framework to contemporary global justice theorising and to show that the former is, in certain regards, very much in line with the gist of the latter.…”

“…And finally, the assumption that—given that resources and space have come to exist without human interference or achievement—nobody has a claim to them based on contribution or personal achievement. These three claims in conjunction are supposed to warrant the theoretical starting point that ‘all human beings, no matter when and where they were born, are in some sense symmetrically located with regard to the earth's resources and space’ (Risse : 88)—in a nutshell, they originally own the earth in common.…”

“…The exclusive focus on the ‘usefulness for human purposes of three‐dimensional spaces’ (Risse : 91) thus leaves the Grotian framework prone to overlook—or unable to theorise—the ways in which we relate to each other independently or at least derivatively of how each our respective holdings contributes to our needs satisfaction . In putting at the centre stage ‘our relationship with the planet as a whole’ (Risse : 11) rather than our interactions with other individuals, it speaks to a way of theorising that reduces questions of global justice to questions of legitimate distribution.…”