‘Common possession of the earth and the right to be somewhere: a commentary on Jakob Huber’s Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism’

Jakob Huber’s Kant’s Grounded Cosmopolitanism focuses on an underanalyzed aspect of Kant’s theory, namely, Kant’s distinctive account of common possession of the earth, and combines Kant scholarship and contemporary global justice debates to show the ongoing relevance and potential of what Huber calls Kant’s ‘grounded cosmopolitanism.’ Huber argues that the right to be somewhere is a ‘material right to something located in time and space’ (27). This revisionist account of the right to be somewhere is at the core of Huber’s ‘argument from earth dwellership,’ and among the central arguments of the book. Kant’s argument from earth dwellership, so Huber argues, constitutes ‘an independent strand of thought that is concerned with the normative complexity of coming into a world of finite space as corporeal agents’ (36). In this article, I will inquire whether it is plausible to adopt Huber’s revisionist interpretation of the right to be somewhere. I will argue that although his argument is compelling at first sight, Huber’s understanding of the right to be somewhere as a ‘material right’ would have undesirable theoretical implications.