Reply to Abizadeh, Chung and Farrelly

It is a great honor that my book has received such sustained attention by some of my esteemed fellow travellers. Arash Abizadeh, Ryoa Chung and Colin Farrelly focus on different parts of my book, Abizadeh on the second, Farrelly on the third, and Chung on the fourth. I respond to them in that order. To all major points raised by Abizadeh, my response is that the book already addresses the matter. Abizadeh often omits central bits of my argument or makes a caricature of them, to such an extent that my position is not addressed at all. Abizadeh may have found my discussions unpersuasive and ignores them for that reason. I do not mean to be taciturn, but since indeed these discussions are not taken up, I can do little more than to refer to the relevant passages. Abizadeh writes that “claiming that there is an inalienable, indefeasible right to use original resources to satisfy one’s basic needs might just be interpreted as claiming that there is a constraint of justice on any conventional property regime.” I agree. I also agree that, as he adds, “[o]ne can say this without saying that the constraint constitutes a type of ownership, and one can say it while further insisting that there is no natural ownership of anything, i.e., that all property is conventional.” One can do all this. But I explain why nonetheless it is sensible to think of the earth as collectively owned in a natural-rights sense. I do so in chapter 6, second paragraph of p. 113, and also at the beginning of chapter 7, pp. 130-131.One reason is that we increasingly face problems that concern humanity’s way of dealing with this planet as a whole. An appropriately non-chauvinistic way of developing humanity’s collective ownership is one way of capturing the importance of that kind of problem, and thus makes the planet as such and our relationship with it central to political philosophy.“Appropriately non-chauvinistic” means that the emphasis must be on the symmetry of claims across all human beings (and across generations), rather than any kind of dominion over the rest of nature.The fruitfulness of that approach would then have to be judged by the kind of work that I submit it can do. Part 2 of my book applies the topic of humanity’s collective ownership of the earth to problems such as immigration, human rights, obligations to future generations and climate change. A second reason is that claims of need are frequently frustratingly amorphous. They are often usefully supplemented by the consideration that what we require to meet basic needs are resources and spaces that are nobody’s accomplishment.That thought is again well-captured in terms of appropriately understood natural ownership rights. A third reason is that ownership of resources and spaces is a rather central human concern. Conventional legal systems regulate ownership. However, that fact raises the question of whether such conventional legal systems can themselves be justified by pre-conventional considerations. Abizadeh does not address any of these considerations. I do not know what he would make of them. Abizadeh argues that I implicitly admit that talk of collective ownership is not warranted. After all, I concede that a version of No Ownership is also plausible, to wit, one that endorses provisos that make that view identical to Common Ownership in what it permits and forbids. But anybody who accepts my reasons for wanting to talk about collective ownership would draw a different conclusion. They would think defenders of No Ownership with provisos that make the theory identical to mine in the relevant sense do in fact accept that in …