The Right to Relocation: Disappearing Island Nations and Common Ownership of the Earth

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 281-300

  Risse, Mathias ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

AOSIS; Climate Change; Common Ownership; Human Rights; Immigration; Small Island Nations

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950782567     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00218.x     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. For facts about Kiribati, see “Kiribati,” World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency; available at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kr.html (accessed April 9, 2009).
2. The proposal was made, e.g., during a talk at Harvard University in September 2008, about which see Alvin Powell, “Island Nation President Plans for Extinction,” Harvard University Gazette, September 25, 2008; available at www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/09.25/13-kiribati.html.
3. See also “Statement by His Excellency Anote Tong, President of the Republic of Kiribati, General Debate of the 63rd Session of the UN General Assembly, September 25, 2008”; available at www.un.org/ga/63/generaldebate/pdf/kiribati_en.pdf
4. Maryanne Loughry and Jane McAdam, “Kiribati—Relocation and Adaptation,” Forced Migration Review 31 (October 2008), pp. 51—52; available at www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR31/51–52.pdf.
5. General Assembly, “Reeling from Impacts of Global Warming, Small Island States Urge General Assembly to Take Comprehensive Action,” GA/10754, September 25, 2008; available at www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/ga10754.doc.htm.
6. For a newspaper article on the Australian branch of this program, see Graham Readfearn, “Kiribati Faces Extinction from Rising Ocean Levels,” Courier-Mail (Australia), Features, August 23, 2008, p. 43.
7. There has been a good deal of discussion about historical emissions and possible obligations emerging from them. See, for instance, Henry Shue, “Global Environment and International Inequality,” International Affairs 75, no. 3 (1999), pp. 531—545
8. Stephen M. Gardiner, “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” Ethics 114 (April 2004), pp. 555—600
9. Simon Caney, “Climate Change, Justice, and the Duties of the Advantaged,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2009)
10. Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 2 (“One Atmosphere”)
11. Mathias Risse, “Who Should Shoulder the Burden? Global Climate Change and Common Ownership of the Earth,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP08–075. There is also the view that contemporary actors cannot be accountable for the actions of past emitters, on whose actions they had no impact. However, there are political (or often only societal or economic) continuities within countries that create such accountability. Moreover, actions in the past continue to shape the prospects of contemporary actors.
12. For general introductions to these discussions, see Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
13. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
14. I develop this standpoint of collective ownership in detail in The Grounds of Justice: An Inquiry about the State in Global Perspective (forthcoming).
15. For this particular approach to human rights, see Mathias Risse, “A Right to Work? A Right to Leisure? Labor Rights as Human Rights,” Law & Ethics of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2009)
16. Mathias Risse, “Common Ownership of the Earth as a Non-Parochial Standpoint: A Contingent Derivation of Human Rights,”European Journal of Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009)
17. Mathias Risse, “Human Rights as Membership Rights in the Global Order,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP08–006.
18. Specifically on collective ownership, see Mathias Risse, “Original Ownership of the Earth: A Contemporary Approach,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP08–073.
19. An exception to the comparative neglect of this kind of thinking in recent political thought is left-libertarianism. See Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds., The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (New York: Palgrave, 2000)
20. Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds., Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Palgrave, 2000).
21. I quote from The Rights of War and Peace in the customary manner, where “II.2.II.1” means “second volume, second book, second chapter, first section.” The 2005 Liberty Fund edition is especially accessible.
22. Buckle, Natural Law, p. 95.
23. There is an enormous literature on the foundations of property. For overviews, see Lawrence C. Becker, Property Rights: Philosophical Foundations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977)
24. Andrew Reeve, Property (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986)
25. Alan Ryan, Property (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).
26. Tony Honoré, “Ownership,” in his Making Law Bind: Essays Legal and Philosophical (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
27. For discussion of the conditions under which man-made products, including improvements of original resources, should no longer be accompanied by special entitlements of those who made them or their offspring, see Michael Blake and Mathias Risse, “Immigration and Common Ownership of the Earth,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy 23 (2009).
28. H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
29. For the Hohfeld terminology, see William Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 5.
30. Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1996), p. 35.
31. John Hospers, Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971), p. 65, makes a similar point.
32. See Peter Malanczuk, Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law, 7th ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 149ff and 184ff. Outer space is also treated in this way.
33. These implications have been explored elsewhere. See Michael Blake and Mathias Risse, “Migration, Territoriality, and Culture,” in Jesper Ryberg, Thomas S. Peterson, and Clark Wolf, eds., New Waves in Applied Ethics (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
34. Blake and Risse, “Immigration and Common Ownership”
35. Mathias Risse, “On the Morality of Immigration,” Ethics & International Affairs 22, no. 1 (2008). Note that the empirical investigations that would have to go into assessing over- and under-use are rather involved, because what matters here is per capita use not of two-dimensional surfaces but instead of three-dimensional spaces. For this to be a meaningful operation we need a valuing function that can assess something like the “value for human purposes” of three-dimensional parts of the world.
36. Joshua Cohen, “Is there a Human Right to Democracy?” in Christine Sypnowich, ed., The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G. A. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 226—249.
37. James Griffin, On Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
38. Amartya Sen, “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32 (2004), p. 317.
39. Michael Blake, “Discretionary Immigration,” Philosophical Topics 30, no. 2 (2002), pp. 273—291.
40. Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson, Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
41. The biblical story can be read in different ways. See Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 55 (1967), pp. 1203—1207
42. John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974), chs. 1 and 2. Passmore contains a wealth of information about the diversity of attitudes toward nature that have been held across cultural traditions.
43. For the reference to Calvin, see Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, p. 13.
44. For an overview of ways of thinking about the value of nature, see Angelika Krebs, Ethics of Nature: A Map (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999).
45. David Wiggins, “Nature, Respect for Nature, and the Human Scale of Values,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100, no. 1 (2000), pp. 1—32, emphasizes that nature is “sublime and awesome,” and that our valuing it thus must have an impact on our attitudes toward it.
46. Robert Goodin, Green Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), defends the view that the value of nature lies in the fact that it gives us a context in which our lives can find a meaning. What is crucial about this context is that humans have not designed it.
47. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 224ff.
48. Bernard Williams, “Must a Concern for the Environment Be Centered on Human Beings?” in his Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 234.
49. For different proposals for such a policy architecture, see Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins, eds., Architectures for Agreement: Addressing Global Climate Change in the Post-Kyoto World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
50. See also Darrel Moellendorf, “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation,” Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 3 (2009), pp. 246—264.
51. See Risse, “Who Should Shoulder the Burden?” for this proposal. There, I argue for that proposal partly by way of rejecting competing ideas, in particular a proposal that thinks of permissible emissions in per capita terms and then derives assignments of burdens, as well as a proposal that emphasizes accountability for past emissions.
52. See Axel Michaelowa, “Graduation and Deepening,” in Aldy and Stavins, eds., Architectures for Agreement, pp. 81—105, for the idea of a double index involving the “polluter pays” and “ability to pay” principles.