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As awareness of global warming has spread during the past couple of decades and developed into the realization that humanity faces an existential threat, a number of more or less Kantian liberal or cosmopolitan moral and political theorists have attempted to address questions of justice raised by the climate crisis. David Held was among the most prolific and influential of them. Here I discuss Held's cosmopolitan perspective on climate governance and consider its bearing on certain recent proposals for new institutions, including in particular a proposal offered by John Broome and Duncan Foley for establishing a World Climate Bank (WCB). I argue that such a WCB may be endorsable from Held's perspective, depending how the initial proposal may get further developed. Held's approach to politics is similar to Kant's in certain significant respects, including the role of hope. Both approaches are valuable and important in relation to the climate crisis. ; Alyssa R. Bernstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio University, USA, where she has been teaching since 2002. Her articles on the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls have appeared in various academic journals, including Kantian Review and Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik (Annual Review of Law and Ethics), as well as in several edited volumes. She is the author of six extensive and mutually cross-referenced encyclopedia articles on moral and political cosmopolitanism, John Rawls's political philosophy, and climate justice, in Springer's online, open-access Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Her recent articles include: "No Justice in Climate Policy?" in Ethics and Global Climate Change: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XL (2016), and "Civil Disobedience: Towards a Kantian Conception" in Kant's Doctrine of Right in the Twenty-first Century, eds. L. Krasnoff, N. Sánchez Madrid, and P. Satne (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018).

Abstract.  Human rights are urgently important rights that all individual persons may validly claim and that all governments are obligated to respect. According to some philosophers, no government can plausibly claim legitimate authority unless its legal and political system ascribes such rights, and no society can plausibly claim to be just unless it has a legitimate government. John Rawls presents his own version of this conception in the context of his account of the moral basis of a just global system of public law, which he calls the Law of Peoples. According to some of his critics, including Onora O'Neill, not only is the Law of Peoples statist, but also it relies on a false view of the state. O'Neill has developed a new conception of an ideally just global order in which states have fewer, and corporations more, powers and obligations to secure human rights, in contrast to Rawls's conception. Her conception is consistent with Anne‐Marie Slaughter's account of the transformation of state sovereignty due to globalization. However, contrary to initial appearances, it is not the case that O'Neill's and Slaughter's views taken together require significant modification of Rawls's conception of human rights. There is no fundamental conflict between Rawls's conception of human rights and Slaughter's account of state transformation. And O'Neill's criticisms of Rawls's view are unwarranted.