«Common Property of the Earth», Human Rights and Global Justice

Abstract

After comparing Risse’s conception of Common Property of the Earth (PCT) with other theories of global redistribution (Steiner, Pogge) or with conceptions of human rights in terms of membership (Cohen, Benhabib), we conclude that PCT as theory of distributive justice defends an unnecessarily low threshold; and as human rights conception doesn’t provide robustness in socioeconomic measures. Finally, the specification of human rights out of global membership cannot be translated into a «right not to be excluded from the new public property» (Sachar). This is so because the mere subsistence condition in human rights does not necessarily imply the condition of independence in the original status of co-owner. Therefore, this contingent derivation of human rights does not meet the transitivity required by its own justification requirements.