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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Mathias Risse
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Abstract

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

Mathias Risse

In recent work I have tried to revitalize the standpoint of humanity's commonly owning the earth. This standpoint has implications for a range of problems that have recently preoccupied us at the global level, including immigration, obligations to future generations, climate change, and human rights. In particular, this approach helps illuminate what moral claims to international aid small island nations whose existence is threatened by global climate change have. A recent proposal for relocating his people across different nations by President Tong of Kiribati is a case in point. My approach vindicates President Tong's proposal.

Keywords

Common OwnershipHuman RightsSmall Island NationsAOSISClimate ChangeImmigration
Type
Features
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 281 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2009

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References

Notes

1 For facts about Kiribati, see “Kiribati,” World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency; available at http:\\www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kr.html (accessed April 9, 2009). 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 http:\\www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/09.25/13-kiribati.html. 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 http:\\www.un.org/ga/63/generaldebate/pdf/kiribati_en.pdf; and Maryanne Loughry and Jane McAdam, “Kiribati—Relocation and Adaptation,” Forced Migration Review 31 (October 2008), pp. 51–52; available at http:\\www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR31/51-52.pdf.

2 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 http:\\www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/ga10754.doc.htm.

3 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.Google Scholar

4 The official AOSIS site is located at http:\\www.sidsnet.org/aosis/index.html.Google Scholar

5 The wording is that the forum leaders “encourage the Pacific's Development Partners to increase their technical and financial support for climate change action on adaptation, mitigation and, if necessary, relocation” (seehttp:\\www.forumsec.org.fj/pages.cfm/newsroom/press-statements/2008/forum-leaders-endorse-niue-declaration-on-climate-change.html).The Pacific Islands Forum is an intergovernmental organization that aims to enhance cooperation between the independent countries of the Pacific Ocean; members also include Australia and New Zealand.Google Scholar

6 There has been a good deal of discussion about historical emissions and possible obligations emerging from them. See, for instance, Shue, Henry, “Global Environment and International Inequality,” International Affairs 75 no. 3 (1999), pp. 531–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gardiner, Stephen M., “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” Ethics 114, (April2004), pp. 555–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caney, Simon, “Climate Change, Justice, and the Duties of the Advantaged,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12 no. 2 (2009Google Scholar; Singer, Peter, One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 2 (“One Atmosphere”)Google Scholar; and 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.

7 For general introductions to these discussions, see Buckle, Stephen, Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Tuck, Richard, The Rights of War and Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

8 I develop this standpoint of collective ownership in detail in The Grounds of Justice: An Inquiry about the State in Global Perspective (forthcoming). For this particular approach to human rights, see Risse, Mathias, “A Right to Work? A Right to Leisure? Labor Rights as Human Rights,” Law & Ethics of Human Rights 3 no. 1 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Risse, Mathias, “Common Ownership of the Earth as a Non-Parochial Standpoint: A Contingent Derivation of Human Rights,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 no. 2 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mathias Risse, “Human Rights as Membership Rights in the Global Order,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP08-006. Specifically on collective ownership, see Mathias Risse, “Original Ownership of the Earth: A Contemporary Approach,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper RWP08-073.

9 An exception to the comparative neglect of this kind of thinking in recent political thought is left-libertarianism. See Vallentyne, Peter andSteiner, Hillel, eds., The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (New York: Palgrave, 2000)Google Scholar; and Vallentyne, Peter andSteiner, Hillel, eds., Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Palgrave, 2000).Google Scholar

10 I quote fromThe 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 .Google Scholar

11 Buckle, , Natural Law, p.95.Google Scholar

12 There is an enormous literature on the foundations of property. For overviews, see Becker, Lawrence C., Property Rights: Philosophical Foundations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977)Google Scholar; Reeve, Andrew, Property (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ryan, Alan, Property (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

13 We own natural endowments in common because nobody has generated these endowments. We simply find ourselves among them. One may worry that it is misleading to think of natural endowments as an “original” stock because the stock of natural endowments is alwayschanging. For example, there are dynamic geological processes and ecosystems, and many of the most important natural endowments are regenerative. Moreover, human activity of course affects the stock of natural endowments. Perhaps it is better to instead distinguish between natural endowments and the added value generated through human efforts. But that choice of terminology is not straightforward, either, because human activities are also part of nature. No term here is entirely free from difficulties.Google Scholar

14 Honoré, Tony, “Ownership,” in hisMaking Law Bind: Essays Legal and Philosophical (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).Google Scholar

15 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 Blake, Michael andRisse, Mathias, “Immigration and Common Ownership of the Earth,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy 23 (2009).Google Scholar

16 Hart, H. L. A., Essays on Bentham: Jurisprudence and Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).For the Hohfeld terminology, seeEdmundson, William, An Introduction to Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Readers might still wonder why this approach would only create claims to so little. For our purposes it actually suffices that Common Ownershipat least leads to sufficientarian rights claims. However, I also believe that Common Ownership cannot generate stronger rights. Common Ownership rights are natural rights because we can justify them without reference to conventions or institutions that hold within or among groups, as well as without any reference to any transactions, such as promises or contracts. The justification has appealed only to natural attributes of persons, and the force of these rights can be recognized as valid by all reasonable people independently of any provisions of positive law. Whenever somebody offers a stronger interpretation of Egalitarian Ownership than Common Ownership, a reasonable response is that the intuitions supporting Egalitarian Ownership are already exhausted by Common Ownership.Google Scholar

18 Rothbard, Murray, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1996), p.35.Hospers, John, Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971), p.65, makes a similar point.Google Scholar

19 This rebuttal does not show that right-libertarians are wrong; it merely shows that collective ownership is not subject to such a reductio. Right-libertarians—and this indeed is their defining feature—offer their own conception of Egalitarian Ownership and interpret its symmetry requirement in such a way that no constraints apply to appropriation other than those that pertain to the meaning of “appropriation” or “occupation.” One might object that, on such an account, latecomers would be significantly disadvantaged; that this account would in fact end up not constraining private appropriating much at all, and thus leave altogether too much to luck; or that, as a consequence, this account tolerates too much inequality in the possession of natural resources, or inequality based on such possession. Defenders of such a view might resist objections that draw attention to such allegedly implausible implications of such a strong view by insisting that such are simply the consequences of an independently plausible interpretation of Egalitarian Ownership that, as such, must be accepted. Ultimately, one needs to press against right-libertarians that they disregard a notion of minimal human solidarity, a basic acknowledgment of a minimal entitlement to external resources that everybody has.

20 See Malanczuk, Peter, Akehurst's Modern Introduction to International Law, 7th ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 149ff and184ffGoogle Scholar. Outer space is also treated in this way.

21 These implications have been explored elsewhere. See Blake, Michael andRisse, Mathias, “Migration, Territoriality, and Culture,” inRyberg, Jesper, Peterson, Thomas S., andWolf, Clark, eds., New Waves in Applied Ethics (New York: Palgrave, 2007)Google Scholar; Blake, andRisse, , “Immigration and Common Ownership”; and Mathias Risse, “On the Morality of Immigration,” Ethics & International Affairs 22 no. 1 (2008)Google Scholar. 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.

22 Cohen, Joshua, “Is there a Human Right to Democracy?” inSypnowich, Christine, ed., The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G. A. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 226–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Griffin, James, On Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 A fully developed conception of human rights consists of four elements: (1) a list of these rights; (2) an account of what features turn individuals into rights holders; (3) an account of the principle or process that generates that list of rights; and (4) an account of corresponding obligations. Any full-fledged conception wouldalso make clear why such a conception is worth having, and why it is appropriate to use the language of rights. We only need to deal with some of these issues.Google Scholar

25 Sen, Amartya, “Elements of a Theory of Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32, (2004), p.317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Blake, Michael, “Discretionary Immigration,” Philosophical Topics 30 no. 2 (2002), pp. 273–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Gruen, Lori andJamieson, Dale, Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

28 The biblical story can be read in different ways. See White, Lynn, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 55, (1967), pp. 1203–07CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Passmore, John, Man's Responsibility for Nature (London: Duckworth, 1974)Google Scholar, chs. 1 and 2. Passmore contains a wealth of information about the diversity of attitudes toward nature that have been held across cultural traditions. For the reference to Calvin, see Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, p. 13.

29 For an overview of ways of thinking about the value of nature, see Krebs, Angelika, Ethics of Nature: A Map (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wiggins, David, “Nature, Respect for Nature, and the Human Scale of Values,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 no. 1 (2000), pp. 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasizes that nature is “sublime and awesome,” and that our valuing it thus must have an impact on our attitudes toward it. Goodin, Robert, Green Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 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.

30 Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p.224ff.Google Scholar

31 Williams, Bernard, “Must a Concern for the Environment Be Centered on Human Beings?” in hisMaking Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 For different proposals for such a policy architecture, seeAldy, Joseph andStavins, Robert, eds., Architectures for Agreement: Addressing Global Climate Change in the Post-Kyoto World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).See also Darrel Moellendorf, “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation,” Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 3 (2009), pp. 246–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 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. See Michaelowa, Axel, “Graduation and Deepening,” inAldy, andStavins, , eds., Architectures for Agreement, pp. 81–105Google Scholar, for the idea of a double index involving the “polluter pays” and “ability to pay” principles.