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In recent work I have tried to revitalize the standpoint of humanity's commonly owning the earth. This standpoint has implications for a range of problems that have recently preoccupied us at the global level, including immigration, obligations to future generations, climate change, and human rights. In particular, this approach helps illuminate what moral claims to international aid small island nations whose existence is threatened by global climate change have. A recent proposal for relocating his people across different nations by President Tong of Kiribati is a case in point. My approach vindicates President Tong's proposal.

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Debates about global justice have traditionally fallen into two camps. Statists believe that principles of justice can only be held among those who share a state. Those who fall outside this realm are merely owed charity. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, believe that justice applies equally among all human beings. This book shifts the terms of this debate and shows how both views are unsatisfactory. Stressing humanity's collective ownership of the earth, it offers a new theory of global distributive justice—what it calls pluralist internationalism—where in different contexts, different principles of justice apply. Arguing that statists and cosmopolitans seek overarching answers to problems that vary too widely for one single justice relationship, the book explores who should have how much of what we all need and care about, ranging from income and rights to spaces and resources of the earth. It acknowledges that especially demanding redistributive principles apply among those who share a country, but those who share a country also have obligations of justice to those who do not because of a universal humanity, common political and economic orders, and a linked global trading system. The book's inquiries about ownership of the earth give insights into immigration, obligations to future generations, and obligations arising from climate change. It considers issues such as fairness in trade, responsibilities of the WTO, intellectual property rights, labor rights, whether there ought to be states at all, and global inequality, and it develops a new foundational theory of human rights.

A central theme throughout Thomas Pogge's pathbreaking World Poverty and Human Rights is that the global political and economic order harms people in developing countries, and that our duty toward the global poor is therefore not to assist them but to rectify injustice. But does the global order harm the poor? I argue elsewhere that there is a sense in which this is indeed so, at least if a certain empirical thesis is accepted. In this essay, however, I seek to show that the global order not only does not harm the poor but can plausibly be credited with the considerable improvements in human well-being that have been achieved over the last 200 years. Much of what Pogge says about our duties toward developing countries is therefore false.