Straddling the equator, Kiribati consists of thirty-three coral atolls scattered over 3.5 million square kilometers at the center of the vast Pacific Ocean. The capital, Tarawa, is halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before might well be found there since Kiribati also straddles the international date line. Altogether, the islands are only about four times the size of Washington, D.C., but have more than 1, 100 kilometers of coastline. Although it has a birthrate of four children per woman, Kiribati's existence is in jeopardy. The islands may become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels and salination caused by climate change. In response to this threat, Anote Tong, Kiribati's president, proposes an extraordinary plan: to scatter his people of about 100, 000 throughout the nations of the world before the sea swallows up their native islands. Footnote 1

Addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 25, 2008, Tong pointed out that relocation at this scale would require long-term planning, “so that when people migrate, they will migrate on merit and with dignity.”Footnote 2 Ideally, Kiribati's government would prefer to identify an area where its people could relocate as a whole. Assuming that to be unlikely, however, they are pursuing the idea of global distribution as the most palatable alternative. The plan would have groups of citizens (perhaps 1, 000 per year to begin) receive job training and seek skilled jobs in other nations. Others could later turn to these early emigrants to facilitate their own exit as the environmental situation worsens. This plan has already begun to be implemented, with small groups of nurses going to Australia for training and other workers to New Zealand. Footnote 3

Other small-island and low-lying coastal countries have similar problems, and since 1990 a large number of such countries have formed the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). AOSIS's forty-three members and observers represent 28 percent of developing countries, 20 percent of UN member states, and 5 percent of the world's population. Footnote 4 The primary purpose of this association is to articulate concerns about climate change, which they have done as effectively as possible (given their severely limited political influence) in a number of conferences. The main thrust of their interventions so far, however, has been an insistence on the urgency of climate change mitigation, rather than the sort of adaptation (and, in this case, resignation to their fate) captured by Tong's proposal. Nevertheless, the proposal was cautiously endorsed in the Niue Declaration on Climate Change during the Thirty-Ninth Pacific Islands Forum in August 2008. Footnote 5

What support from moral arguments is there for Tong's proposal? Different approaches are possible. One approach would focus on Kiribati's claims to either protection against or compensation from those nations that are causally responsible for the crisis, given that inhabitants of Kiribati have themselves done less per capita than those of almost any other country to cause climate change. However, this strategy encounters difficulties. First, many of those who, over the centuries, have contributed to climate change were unaware of the damage they were doing—nor indeed could they have been aware. Second, although the inhabitants of Kiribati may not have done much to cause climate change, they have benefited from economic changes and general improvements in living conditions to which the causes of climate change are tied. Footnote 6

It may be that these difficulties are insufficient to deny claims to compensation—certainly of those who will eventually lose their entire habitat. Although many past polluters cannot be blamed, a fair number of recent polluters can. And although even Kiribati has benefited from industrialization, the country is confronted with an entirely undue share of burdens from the same process. Still, if claims to compensation are based on causal claims about the origins of the troubles, responsibilities for providing compensation should be, too; and unless there is more to Kiribati's claim, considerations of causality will be the only relevant considerations to that end. We can, however, support President Tong's proposal in a manner that does not enlist considerations of causality, and thus does not assign responsibilities depending on considerations about who has contributed how much. The alternative strategy I offer holds that inhabitants of Kiribati, like all human beings, are co-owners of the earth and as such have claims to relocation in the event that their existence becomes impossible where they presently live—and regardless of who was responsible for creating this situation.

That humanity collectively owns the earth was a predominant idea in the political philosophy of the seventeenth century: Grotius, Locke, and others debated how to capture this status and the conditions under which parts of the Global Common can be privatized. Footnote 7 Although collective ownership was then largely religiously motivated, we can revitalize it nontheologically. Indeed, as I hope to demonstrate, doing so is sensible and valuable in light of all the problems of global reach that have recently preoccupied us, such as questions about immigration, responsibility for future generations, and climate change.

In recent work I have argued that the idea of collective ownership of the earth also gives rise to a conception of human rights. In virtue of the fact that humanity collectively owns the earth, individuals possess a set of natural rights that characterize their status as co-owners. The existence of states puts these rights in jeopardy, and a set of associative rights—rights that individuals have in virtue of being subject to certain political or economic structures (in this case, membership rights in the global order)—must thereby be in place to ensure that natural rights are preserved. Footnote 8

While this approach may strike some as missing the core point of human rights (given that it does not make the idea of a distinctively human life central), I believe it has several strengths: (1) it rests on universally acceptable foundations; (2) it can readily demonstrate why the language of “rights” rather than goals is appropriate here; and (3) it entails a genuinely global responsibility for these rights. As far as the perhaps counterintuitive connection between human rights and ownership is concerned, one must keep in mind that what is at stake is the sheer space in which all human existence takes place. Regardless of one's position on this point, it should be of interest to bring this revitalization of the ownership approach to bear on problems caused by global warming, which is the paradigmatic problem affecting our planet—and thus the one object humanity owns collectively— as a whole.

Perhaps the most straightforward way of offering support for President Tong's proposal would simply be to draw attention to the dire existential threat that Kiribati faces or, at least, may eventually face. As far as moral argument is concerned, one could then either argue that the proper response (one, for instance, that a virtuous person would give) to this obvious need is to offer assistance (which may take on the shape of Tong's proposal); or that these needs generate entitlements to such assistance. Note that these strategies put the whole argumentative burden on the idea of needs. I do not as much quarrel with this strategy as proceed differently. Whereas my approach likewise grants moral significance to the satisfaction of basic needs, it derives entitlements through an argument that does not put the whole argumentative burden on needs. From the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth, entitlements are derived in a way that stresses the symmetrical position in which individuals find themselves with regard to external spaces and resources that they have done nothing to create, but that all need for survival.

This standpoint implies that countries can claim exclusive control over portions of the originally commonly owned spaces and resources of the earth only if they accept certain conditions that make such an arrangement acceptable to other co-owners. Among these conditions is that others are entitled to certain forms of support in their endeavors to make a living on the collectively owned planet, which includes an entitlement to be given shelter in cases of disaster in much the way that Tong sketches. Having such an argument available should be appealing to all those who are skeptical that appeals to needs or moral equality get us very far by way of deriving entitlements at the global level; those who are not worried by such doubts should think of this line of inquiry as an addition to their repertoire.

One might wonder whether we could find a human right to relocation within existing human rights structures without having to deploy the notion of collective ownership. Perhaps one could refer to a right to asylum, or to the emerging doctrine of a Responsibility to Protect. But the concern here is to explore one particular way to offer philosophical foundations for such notions, rather than to enlist them directly. I do not claim that the only way of offering such foundations goes through the notion of collective ownership of the earth, but I will point out that this way of approaching the project has some advantages.

GROTIUS ON COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP AND THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY

It is John Locke whose account of collective ownership is probably best known, especially in connection with his “mixing-of-labor” approach to private appropriation. Yet my attempt to revitalize the collective ownership approach draws inspiration from a different source—one that is no longer part of the mainstream. Footnote 9 Like no other work in the philosophy of international relations, Hugo Grotius's The Rights of War and Peace (1625) makes ownership of the earth central to regulating the relations among both individuals and political entities, offering the following account:

With his depiction of man's dominion over the earth as God's gift, Grotius makes clear that the earth is for the use of human beings. As Stephen Buckle puts it, “in using the world for their own ends, human beings are not strangers (or trespassers) on a foreign soil. They are at home.”Footnote 11

According to Grotius, God's gift establishes a right for all people to make use of the goods provided by the earth. Alas, this right is rather minimal, and does not even include an enduring entitlement to things one has gathered or worked on before. For example, if I pick an apple for my immediate consumption and you snatch it from my hand as I am putting it into my mouth, you violate my God-given right to use the apple. However, if I put some apples aside and hope to consume them in a few days' time, there is nothing in Grotius's account of divine rights that would preclude others from eating them in the meantime. Likewise, if I work on a field I cannot, by divine right alone, rightfully preclude others from harvesting what I have sowed. Clearly, humans must make agreements to establish rights that go beyond entitlements to immediate consumption. Yet any form of sophisticated economic and political arrangement requires property norms that go beyond what is provided for by divine gift. Such norms, then, have to be put in place by conventions.

To be adequate, these conventions must mind the fact that the earth was originally given to humankind collectively. One implication of this point is the postulation of a “right of necessity,” which states that in cases of emergencies individuals still have the right to satisfy their basic needs with the resources of the earth even if this requires the violation of property conventions. Property conventions cannot condemn anybody to starvation. Such a right of necessity does not derive from charity (II.2.VI.4). Instead, it restricts the legitimate scope of private property rights. Property appropriation, according to Grotius, is limited in other ways as well. People may, for instance, demand the right of free passage through territory that they do not own, or expect to be permitted to rest ashore to recover from a journey or to seek shelter if prosecuted at home. Products, meanwhile, must be sold at reasonable prices if they are not needed by the producers (II.2.XIX). As these cases make clear, the ownership status of the earth puts considerable limitations on what can be done with portions and products of the earth.

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP OF THE EARTH SECULARIZED

While Grotius takes the biblical standpoint of the earth as a divine gift, like Locke he thought this view should be acceptable even if humankind had never received divine revelation. Indeed, the view that the earth originally belongs to humankind collectively remains plausible without religious input. After all, the resources of the earth are valuable and necessary for any human activities to unfold; and those resources have come into existence without human interference. These points must be considered, for instance, when individual accomplishments are used to justify property rights strong enough to determine use across generations. Footnote 12

Egalitarian Ownership is the view that the earth originally belongs to humankind collectively, in the sense that all humans, no matter when and where they are born, must have some sort of symmetrical claim to it. (“Original” ownership does not connote a relationship with time but is a moral status. Footnote 13) I assert that this is the most plausible view of the ownership of natural resources exactly because, as mentioned, the earth's resources and spaces are the accomplishment of no one, whereas they are needed by everyone. (Note that in the following text, “Joint Ownership” and “Common Ownership” in uppercase are names of interpretations of Egalitarian Ownership, and hence views about ownership of the earth; whereas “joint ownership” and “common ownership” in lowercase are general forms of ownership of anything. I will continue to say that humanity “collectively” owns the earth where the precise form of ownership is not relevant.) Egalitarian Ownership is detached from the complex set of rights and duties that civil law delineates under the heading of property law. Footnote 14 At this level of abstraction from conventions and codes that themselves have to be assessed in relation to views on original ownership, all Egalitarian Ownership states is that all humans have a symmetrical claim to original resources; in particular, this view is not per se “egalitarian” in any sense other than by stipulating this symmetry.

One might argue the term “ownership” is misleading. However, I use the term because of its connection to the familiar notions of ownership in civil law; and we are, after all, concerned with what claims individuals have to resources. To be sure, the considerations motivating Egalitarian Ownership speak to raw materials only, not to what human beings have made of them. True, the distinction between what “is just there” and what has been shaped by humans is blurred for, say, lands that have been wrested from the sea, or for natural gas harnessed from garbage deposits. Nonetheless, we understand well enough the idea of what exists without human interference. Footnote 15

In a next step, we must assess the different possible conceptions of Egalitarian Ownership. Such conceptions differ in terms of how they capture the symmetry of individual agents' claims to original resources. Along these lines, there are roughly four types of ownership status that resources can have: (1) no ownership; (2) joint ownership—ownership directed by collective preferences; (3) common ownership—in which the resource belongs equally to several individuals; and (4) private ownership. Common ownership is a right to use something that does not come with the right to exclude other co-owners from also using it. Certain constraints apply, however. If, for example, the Boston Common were held in this way when it was used for cattle, common ownership requirements—which entail the need for individuals to respect other co-owners and to avoid the Tragedy of the Commons—would constrain each person from bringing more than a certain number of livestock. Joint ownership of the Common, by contrast, would render each use subject to a decision process to be concluded to the satisfaction of each co-owner. This form of ownership ascribes to each co-owner property rights as extensive as rights of private ownership, except that others hold the same rights: joint ownership requires that each co-owner must be satisfied with each form of use. Finally, Egalitarian Ownership might amount to an equal division of the collectively owned stock. In that case, all of the n co-owners could claim a share of 1/n of that stock as private property.

While these various interpretations of Egalitarian Ownership have in common that they all carve out a pre-institutional space of natural rights that constrain property conventions, which in turn regulate what these natural rights leave open, I submit that common ownership is the most plausible conception of the four. While I cannot offer a complete argument for this proposal here, I can offer some elaboration on what common ownership means, what it entails, and why it should be considered the preferred interpretation of Egalitarian Ownership.

The core idea of common ownership is that all co-owners ought to have an equal opportunity to satisfy basic needs to the extent that this turns on obtaining collectively owned resources. This formulation, first, emphasizes an equality of status; second, it points out that this equality of status concerns opportunities to satisfy need (therefore there is no sense in which each co-owner is entitled to an equal share of collectively owned resources, let alone to the support of others in obtaining such a share); and, third, it does so insofar as these needs can be satisfied with resources that are collectively owned.

To put this in Hohfeldian rights terminology, common ownership rights must minimally include liberty rights accompanied by what H. L. A. Hart calls a “protective perimeter” of claim rights. Footnote 16 To have a liberty right is to be free of any duty to the contrary, and, obviously, common ownership rights must include at least rights of that sort; that is, co-owners are under no duty to refrain from using any of the resources of the earth. But the symmetry of claims postulated by Egalitarian Ownership demands more than liberty rights. In light of the intuitions supporting Egalitarian Ownership, to count as an interpretation of this notion, Common Ownership must guarantee some minimal access to resources; that is, it must impose duties to refrain from interference with certain forms of resource use. Therefore, we must add the protective perimeter of claim rights to liberty rights. We can obtain enough mileage from the original intuitions to require that common ownership rights (for Common Ownership to serve as an interpretation of Egalitarian Ownership) be conceived of in sufficientarian terms, in the sense that no co-owner should interfere with the actions of another to the extent that those actions serve to satisfy basic needs. I do not think these intuitions can be pressed beyond that. The concepts of equal division and joint ownership both press these intuitions too far. Footnote 17

Yet we do have to add one more right. We must also make sure individuals can maintain their co-ownership status under more complex arrangements. A necessary condition for the acceptability of such arrangements is that the core purpose of the original rights can still be met. That core purpose is to make sure co-owners have the opportunity to meet their basic needs. In Hohfeldian terminology, co-owners have an immunity from living under political and economic arrangements that interfere with their ability to do so.

Let me address a typical reductio through which right-libertarians often ridicule collective ownership. Can somebody seriously claim, asks Murray Rothbard, that a newborn Pakistani baby has a claim to a plot in Iowa that Smith worked hard to transform into a field? Footnote 18 As soon as one considers such implications of collective ownership, he says, one realizes its implausibility. Smith has claims on the strength of his plight, but the baby has none. Yet collective ownership of the sort I defend does not grant each and every individual claims to each and every object. Not any nugget of gold found on the ocean floor has to be shared among all human beings, nor does each drop of oil extracted in Arabia. That our baby has claims to resources on a par with Smith's is consistent with its not having claims on Smith to vacate that land. Footnote 19

Earlier I said that Egalitarian Ownership is the most plausible view of the original ownership status of the earth given the two starting points that (1) the original resources and spaces of the earth are no one's accomplishment but (2) are needed by everyone. For the subsequent discussion that leads to Common Ownership we have to endorse two additional premises: first, a minimal notion of human solidarity in the form of an acknowledgment of a base-level, universal entitlement to external resources; and second—something we have been assuming implicitly but that also needs to be made explicit—that the satisfaction of basic needs matters morally. So, as I pointed out at the beginning, in this way an appeal to the moral significance of needs enters my approach, but not in a way that puts the whole burden of argument on it. The symmetry of claims to external spaces and resources that is crucial to my argument is derived in a way that includes an appeal to the significance of needs, but cannot be derived from such an appeal alone.

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP OF THE EARTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS: INITIAL STEPS

Although humanity can be said to own the earth collectively, the actual land of the earth is covered by states (with the exceptions of the high seas and Antarctica, which are treated as a Global Common Footnote 20). States reserve the right to determine who enters their territory, and it is through state law that local property conventions are created and enforced. The imposition of a system of states that divides up the world's resources needs therefore to be reconciled with Common Ownership—indeed, for two reasons: first, each state imposes a complex system of political and economic relationships that determines which, if any, original resources individuals have access to; second, the system of states imposes a system of ownership whereby groups claim (group-specific) collective ownership for certain regions. Members of humanity thus come to be excluded from exercising rights with regard to much of what is collectively owned.

One way to think about how to reconcile the presence of a states system with Common Ownership is to explore the implications of the standpoint of collective ownership for immigration. We could ask under what conditions would-be immigrants could reasonably be expected to accept the reality of frontiers. Reflection on that point leads us to an idea of relative over- and under-use of portions of the earth, where the relevant measure would not be per capita occupation of two-dimensional territory but of three-dimensional space of differential usefulness for human purposes. (The term “differential usefulness for human purposes” takes into account the fact that different parts of the earth offer more or less favorable living conditions for humans based on such variables as climatic conditions, availability of water and other resources, altitude, proximity to the seas or access to navigable rivers, and so on.) This approach generates support for President Tong's proposal: after all, the more Kiribati disappears into the sea, the more the per capita use of the region increases relative to per capita use elsewhere (because now the people of Kiribati are limited to a smaller region), and therefore the stronger the inhabitants' claims to immigration become. Footnote 21

To get closer to the subject of human rights, note that the imposition of a states system (regardless of its moral virtues or prudential advantages) generates two problems for co-owners: it exposes them to the ex ante risks and ex post reality of finding themselves in conditions in which their moral status as co-owners can be exercised at most in rudimentary ways, if at all; and it allows them only limited exit options (if any) in the event that they find themselves under an abusive government. In virtue of its concentrations of power, the states system readily has the ability to violate the rights of co-owners, both by undermining their opportunities to satisfy their basic needs and by impeding their ability to relocate.

It is under these conditions that we must ask what to make of the immunity individuals have from living under political and economic arrangements that interfere with those subject to them having opportunities to satisfy their basic needs. In this case the relevant arrangement to which individuals are subject is not merely the state in which they live but the system of states per se. Each state, in virtue of its immediate access to one's body and assets, may deprive one of such opportunities, but so might other states by refusing entry to individuals who cannot satisfy their basic needs where they live. This is at least true of states that have the capacity to let people enter and to satisfy their basic needs without making it impossible for some of their present citizens to satisfy their basic needs. Such states that have this ability but refuse entry are not merely failing to come to the aid of the “needy,” but are also denying them an opportunity to satisfy their needs. Recall the right of necessity and other limitations on appropriation we encountered in Grotius. It is this emphasis on the moral status of each co-owner that must be preserved regardless of circumstances, in particular regardless of special political arrangements, that is also present in this nontheological version of the collective ownership approach.

Common ownership rights are natural and pre-institutional. Once institutions, such as states, are founded, guarantees must be given to co-owners that institutional power will not be used to violate their status. Since such a violation is threatened by the system of states per se, such guarantees take on the form of moral demands against that system of states. Responsibilities that arise in the manner I have outlined must be allocated at the system level, as collective responsibilities, rather than resting exclusively with individual states, least of all only with regard to their own members.

COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP OF THE EARTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS: THE ARGUMENT

But why does all this lead to a conception of human rights? Joshua Cohen proposes that human rights have three features: (1) they are universal and owed by every political society to everybody; (2) they are requirements of political morality whose force does not depend on their expression in enforceable law; and (3) they are especially urgent. Any more specific account of human rights, says Cohen, must meet these constraints, as well as two methodological assumptions: (1) fidelity to major human rights documents, so that a substantial range of these rights is accounted for; and (2) open-endedness, in the sense that even a relatively specific account of human rights must leave scope for arguments in support of additions to the list. Footnote 22

Yet even in endorsing these criteria one can recognize that they do not entail commitments with regard to a range of questions about such rights of the sort that a proper conception of human rights provides. For instance, as James Griffin argues, Footnote 23 accepting these criteria does not imply human rights must be understood as protecting essential features of personhood. A different way of adding more detail to these criteria is to think of “human” rights as rights that individuals hold as members of the global and political order that ipso facto, but contingently, includes everybody. What I have argued above is work toward such a conception; that is, the standpoint of collective ownership gives rise to a set of rights—namely, membership rights in the global order. Footnote 24

In what sense exactly are human rights held in virtue of global-order membership? This “order” that I have in mind is the system of states—arising since the fifteenth century through the expansion of European international society—that covers most of the land of the earth, as well as the network of organizations, political (such as the UN) and economic (such as the Bretton Woods institutions), that provides for “global governance.” Importantly, for there to be enough structure to the “global order” to render that term applicable, and for there to be an accompanying capacity for coordinated action, there is a minimal condition for the existence of rights held within that order. And, indeed, there is enough structure of that sort. Being a member of that order merely means to live on the territory covered by it, which by now all human beings do, if for no other reason than because they all live on the territory of some state. So it does indeed make sense to speak of rights that are held in virtue of membership in the global order. It is helpful to note that this view does not, however, presuppose that individuals participate in the global order. Even secluded tribes possess human rights. They, too, are co-owners of the earth and are constrained by the imposition of the states system even if they do not actually feel the constraints. By contrast, if humans were discovered on the far side of the moon, the considerations explored in this study would not apply to them. That does not mean one could do with them as one pleases. But, as they would not be members of the global order, common ownership considerations would not bear on their moral status.

A benefit of this conception of rights held in virtue of global-order membership is that it makes plausible one common intuition about human rights, which is that they can be of global reach—and therefore justify actions even against societies whose culture does not support them and, moreover, impose obligations on people to fix particular problems that they had no role in causing. This global-membership approach also shows why the language of rights—rather than, say, the languages of goals or values—is appropriate in the context of human rights.

The main cost of the conception I am proposing is that it only grants limited space to the idea that certain things simply must not be done to human beings, regardless of whether they are a matter of global concern. Moreover, my conception of human rights is contingent because it appeals to a contingent—alas, relatively abiding—global order. I am not claiming that this is the only sensible conception. One should not expect there to be a single, philosophically most satisfactory conception of human rights. Instead, the universality captured by the idea of human rights lends itself to different elaborations, where the availability of different accounts of human rights may help them “to command reasoned support,” and “establish a secure intellectual standing.”Footnote 25

RETURNING TO THE KIRIBATI CASE

If we apply the idea of collective ownership to derive membership rights in the global order, states and other powerful organizations acquire obligations to provide two fundamental guarantees whose realization is a global responsibility. First, states and organizations must make sure their power does not render individuals incapable of meeting their basic needs; second, they must provide opportunities for individuals to lead a life at least at subsistence level—that is, at the level of basic-needs satisfaction. A good deal of work still needs to be done to get from these guarantees to a sizeable list of human rights. Yet, if such guarantees indeed exist, the specific dangers imposed on individuals as co-owners through the existence of the global order are neutralized. Recall that one such danger is that the very existence of states radically limits the opportunities for individuals to move elsewhere, even if they cannot make a living, or continue to exist, where they live.

To return to the Kiribati case: What obligations arise in a situation in which a co-owner finds oneself unable to exercise ownership rights in his or her native location? Under circumstances in which a territory is lost to sea rise there is no longer a way of respecting the troubled party's co-ownership rights by helping them to make a living in their current location. Rather, the only way of respecting these rights is to allow the affected people to immigrate.

Just as in Grotius's approach, the right of necessity takes precedence over private property arrangements, and in this approach the rights of such “submerged” people take precedence over any preference on the part of other countries to keep migrants out. Tong's proposal emerges vindicated. There is a human right to relocation, and it would even include a demand upon host countries to put the new immigrants in a position to make a living. Support for this plan is not a matter of charity, but of putting into practice what the inhabitants of Kiribati are owed as co-owners of the earth.

Whether the approach we have proposed here supports Tong's wish for his whole people, or most of them, to move to the same location cannot be answered without further empirical investigation that would reveal which countries in fact are over- or under-using the three-dimensional spaces that they occupy. If there are countries that under-use their share of the earth relative to other countries to such an extent that the whole population of Kiribati could be admitted without creating a considerable overuse situation, Tong's people would indeed have such a claim vis- à-vis those countries based on considerations of collective ownership. If there are no such countries, Tong's people could make no such claim on this particular basis. However, one other way of thinking about the relocation of Kiribati's inhabitants as a single group is for one country to accept them all as a way of discharging their morally required contributions to climate change adaptation, as I discuss below.

One might wonder whether obligations toward the people of Kiribati would not be fully discharged if they were received as environmental refugees, rather than offered membership in their countries of destination upon arrival. However, as Michael Blake argues, any kinds of partial-citizenship arrangements are morally unacceptable if they are either exploitative because people do not have viable alternatives or if they are in one way or another contributing to an unjust global order by taking advantage of people's economic difficulties that themselves are unjust. Footnote 26 Accepting these people merely as refugees would be impermissible at least in light of the first condition: again, presuming that sea rise is inevitable, the inhabitants of Kiribati do not have a viable alternative to emigrating. So the ownership approach entails that immigration must be permitted; but it is then on the strength of independent considerations against partial-citizenship conditions that immigrants from Kiribati can insist on admission to full membership.

OBJECTIONS

Let us explore one line of objection to my view. One may say the idea of humanity collectively owning the earth is a misguided approach to environmental problems for the reason that the idea of ownership has historically played into an unwarranted sort of human superiority. Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson include excerpts from Locke (describing his version of common ownership) in their collection of reflections on nature to make exactly this point. Footnote 27 But Egalitarian Ownership does not presuppose the arrogance associated with that particular interpretation of, for instance, the biblical account that subjects the rest of creation to the human will—an attitude that shows, say, in Calvin's view that God took six days to create the world to demonstrate to humans that everything had been prepared for them. In that way our approach differs from its seventeenth-century predecessors, many of whose defenders took no issue with the human superiority implication. Footnote 28

Egalitarian Ownership is a view about the relationship among human beings and can readily accommodate concerns, say, about the value of nature or the value of nonhuman animals. What Egalitarian Ownership says is that to the extent that we think nature is at our disposal, no human being has a privileged claim to resources. But one might consistently add, say, that parts of the earth have to be set aside for the preservation of animal and plant species, or simply for aesthetic reasons. While civil law often permits us actually to destroy objects we own in accordance with its prescriptions, Egalitarian Ownership does not entail the permissibility of wanton destruction, nor does it commit us to ascribing merely instrumental value to nature. Moreover, valuing nature intrinsically (or even as in some sense sacred), as providing a context where human life can obtain its meaning in the first place, is consistent with the view developed here. Footnote 29

Not all attempts to reconsider our manner of valuing nature are consistent with Egalitarian Ownership; for instance, Aldo Leopold's credo—“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise”—is not. Footnote 30 Leopold suggests that people will come to find practices of “owning land” as despicable as we find practices of “owning people.” Such a “land ethic” moves outside the scope of what one may call enlightened anthropocentrism, which acknowledges that answers to environmental questions “must be based on human values, in the sense of values that human beings can make part of their lives and understand themselves as pursuing and respecting.”Footnote 31

So Egalitarian Ownership is not committed to human chauvinism. Its guiding idea is that any two human beings have symmetrical claims to independently existing resources—an idea consistent with other moral concerns, especially concerns about the environment. Unlike Grotius, we can no longer safely rest our defense of the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth on religious foundations. Nevertheless, a secular version of this approach can help us greatly to think through a number of the normative issues that arise at the global level, not least those issues arising from climate change, such as the fate of small-island nations.

THE MORAL LOGISTICS OF RELOCATION

Assuming now that there is a human right to relocation, how should we think about the “moral logistics” of relocating people from Kiribati and other areas? How might the society of states share the responsibility to receive climate refugees, and how should this right be operationalized?

Any comprehensive answer to these questions must be tied to the development of an overall climate policy architecture. The term “policy architecture” has become customary in this context because what is needed is an agreement that covers the next several decades rather than years. As of early 2009 the political and academic debate about such a policy development is intense, because a successor to the Kyoto Protocol (which will expire in 2012) needs to be concluded. Footnote 32 Climate change requires efforts both to mitigate that change and to adapt to the new situation. The relocation of people who live in areas heavily affected by climate change is an example of adaptation. But since what is needed is an overall agreement that includes a vision of what specific countries are required to do across a range of measures of mitigation and adaptation, it will be hard to answer in isolation the question of who is supposed to do how much in the particular area of climate change–related relocation.

The proposal that I have supported in the context of debating a new climate-policy architecture combines the principles of “polluter pays” and “ability to pay.” Roughly speaking, the idea is to order countries in terms both of per capita emissions and income, and then to form a single, aggregate index from the two rankings. Countries would have to shoulder burdens depending on where in this combined list they find themselves. In other words, what countries are expected to do by way of mitigating or adapting to climate change depends both on how much they are currently contributing to the problem and on how wealthy they are. As noted above, accepting and integrating people from low-lying areas is a measure of adaptation, and countries that undertake this obligation would thereby discharge at least some of their overall climate change obligations. One way of discharging these obligations is to offer a new home to Kiribati's inhabitants, or to make an equivalent offer to the people from another country similarly affected. Given that there is a compensatory aspect to these obligations, countries that offer a new home to environmental refugees could get more credit toward the satisfaction of their obligations from climate change by offering these refugees more than the bare minimum required in virtue of common ownership of the earth. Footnote 33

Assessing which countries are best suited to discharge some of their climate change obligations by resettling climate refugees, from Kiribati and elsewhere, could be a matter of preexisting relations, cultural or linguistic ties, historical connections, or practical capacity. Kiribati, for instance, has a British colonial past, and English is one of its official languages. The country also has special relations with Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Japan—partly historical, and partly because of tight economic interactions. Some of these countries are also geographically closer to Kiribati than, say, the United Kingdom; but all would be in a good position to contribute to adaptation to climate change by, in due course, accepting a share of Kiribati's population. To be sure, there are other countries that might also be in a position to do so in light of the criteria just sketched. In receiving climate refugees, any such country would also receive credit toward the fulfillment of its climate change–related obligations. Ensuring that such measures are seen as a suitable contribution to an overall climate change strategy will require an international agreement, and would need to be included in any successor to the Kyoto Protocol.