Original Common Possession of the Earth

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter unpacks the relation between earth dwellers further by focusing on the idea of original common possession of the earth. It argues against the widespread attempt to liken Kant’s notion to that prevalent in the natural law tradition, that is, as constituting a community of proto-ownership. For Kant, the notion does not provide a distributive standard for carving up the world. Instead, it spells out our shared task of coming to terms with the fact that embodied agents who jointly inhabit a bounded territory can affect and constrain each other with their choices; a challenge that normatively transcends any division of the earth’s surface into slices of property and territory. A detour into the Critique of Pure Reason helps to illuminate that Kant’s disjunctive community of original common possession describes a system of mutual exclusion in which a plurality of different persons stand in a relation of ‘possible physical interaction’. To act from the ‘global standpoint’ is to respect distant strangers as justificatory equals in the process of coming to terms with the fact that we have to share the earth in common.