Description:

Please join the Global Theory Workshop as they host Dr. Margaret Moore from Queen's University. 

ABSTRACT: This paper considers whether threats to biodiversity can lead to a state forfeiting some of the rights over territory that it would otherwise justifiably possess. To make this argument the paper develops an account of territorial rights-forfeiture, which it then applies to the issue of biodiversity loss. It focuses on specific places called biodiversity hotspots, which are sites of extensive biodiversity, and have high value for carbon storage and other ecosystem services, in order to illustrate the account of territorial rights-forfeiture. The paper argues that an international commitment is needed, but not just for the usual reason that international cooperation is necessary to solve the problem (though that is also true). It argues that it is necessary to make sense of the idea of states forfeiting their rights over place through their destructive (to biodiversity) actions.

Margaret Moore is a professor in the Political Studies department, cross-appointed as a courtesy in Philosophy where she teaches in the Master’s in Political and Legal Theory program. She is the author of four books, Who Should Own Natural Resources? (Polity 2019), A Political Theory of Territory (Oxford 2015), Ethics of Nationalism (Oxford 2001) and Foundations of Liberalism (Oxford 1993) and has edited several other books and journal special issues. A Political Theory of Territory was the winner of the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Best Book Prize in 2017, and was translated into Japanese in 2020. She has published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Philosophical Studies, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Political Studies, and Ethics and International Affairs. In 2018 she was an RSS visiting fellow at the Australian National University (March-April) and the Olof Palme Visiting Research Professor at the University of Stockholm (July-December), and in 2019 she was elected a Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada.