Schlagwort: morality

This paper analyzes the conception of common ownership of the earth
(COE) and its recent appropriations in the theory of global distributive
justice. Taking Mathias Risse’s theory as the main reference point, the
paper asks whether COE provides a plausible starting point for thinking
about natural resource justice in the age of the Anthropocene.
After providing a brief summary of Risse’s argument, I focus on three
central aspects of Risse’s theory of COE: 1) the concept of ownership and
its underlying ontological assumptions, 2) the basic needs thesis, and 3)
the implications of common ownership for the climate justice. Concerning
the first, I argue that due to ontological assumptions built into
ownership’s structure and the corresponding relation to non-human
world it authorizes, it is problematic to meaningfully extend it to global
domain and utilize it to protect what I argue is better captured by the
term global commons. Concerning the basic needs thesis, I argue that
Risse relies on an implausibly specieist and anthropocentric notion of
basic needs which can no longer hold in the Anthropocene. I explore the
question whether the replacement of basic needs with human rights can
partially mitigate the basic needs thesis failures. Thirdly, I discuss Risse’s
view of intergenerational justice and the proposal of a fair distribution of
burdens of climate change mitigation. Here I argue for the framework of
global commons to be used instead of common ownership. Overall, I
argue that in the current environmental predicament, COE no longer
appears to be a meaningful conception to ground the morality of human
relationship to natural environment and provide plausible distributive or
other implications for the allocation of natural resources.