Global Justice - Trade Flashcards
What is Walton’s (2020) argument for intergationist principles?
Basic framework for global justice includes moral concern for individuals and a role for states (as representatives for individuals’ collective interests) operating within a society of equal peoples. In an integrationist approach, judgments about these actors’ claims to the gains and losses of trade must be sensitive to their advantages and burdens in other domains.
Substantive integrationist principles recommend judging distributions of gains and losses by considering how individuals’ or states’ shares combine with the goods they hold in other domains to comprise an overall level of advantage. Case for this kind of integrationism:
- We may be concerned about harms, exploitative terms and inequality
- The disadvantaged in developing countries have stronger claims to the gains and against the losses since they hold less in other domains and a morally weightier harm occurs when they lose out.
- Walton claims this meets intuitions about justice appropriately.
Procedural integrationist principles recommend judging a distribution of the gains and losses of trade by considering whether injustices in other domains have done anything to corrupt the process through which it came about. Case for this type of integrationism:
- Unmet moral claims in one domain can corrupt processes by which distributions in another arise
- Most distributions arise against a background of certain kinds of vulnerability or a significant economic, epistemic, and power inequality.
Substantive and procedural integrationist principles integrate and support each other.
How does Walton (2020) criticise James’ (2014) argument for internal principles?
Walton criticises James’ approach on the basis that, despite what is claimed by James, internal approaches cannot address concrete cases with practical guidance better than integrationist approaches.
Walton gives an example of a case in which subsidies are removed, making some in country A worse off and some in country B better off; whilst an integrationist account would claim that it makes a difference whether those who become worse off are advantaged farmers in wealthy states or fledgling producers in developing countries, this judgment would be unavailable using an internalist approach which does not appeal to the broader situation and which would say that it is equally problematic for anyone to be made worse off (according to the collective due care principle). In this case, James endorses the judgment made by the integrationist account by arguing for not compensating advantaged farmers in wealthy states by appealing to supplementary considerations of fairness, showing that he does not think that an internal approach would always work and moves towards more integrationist principles when considering actual examples.
What is James’ (2014) argument for internal principles?
The requirement of structural equity is most important among the demands of fairness; James argues structural equity generates substantial fundamental principles in its own right.
According to James, the basic requirements of socioeconomic structural economy can be expressed in three principles:
- Collective Due Care: trading nations are to protect people against the harms of trade
- International Relative Gains: national income gains due to specifically to international trade are to be distributed equally, unless greater gains flow to poor countries
- Domestic Relative Gains: gains for a given trading society are to be distributed equally among its affected members, unless inequality of gain is reasonably acceptable to them all
The principles are appropriate under conditions of partial integration and the global economy as we know it is partially integrated.
The argument only applies to national income gains due specifically to trade practice; need to distinguish the gains of trade from more general economic improvements.
- How do we do this? According to James, using examples, societal case studies, and reasonable models and measurement proxies.
In what sense is James’ (2014) account international
It is international in a qualified yet particularly strong sense: it provides no scope for comparing levels of gain for any two individuals of the world. This is because in general, mere economic interdependence between people or countries is not sufficient to give rise to the distinctive issue of fairness which is chiefly at issue in international trade. What does raise the distinctive issue is the special kind of social relationship that embeds market relations, namely, the international market reliance practice that allows and regulates economic interdependence. Because the practice has a specifically international structure and purposes, the relation the American and the Brazilian share by way of their economic interdependence is indirect; the basic parties to the organizing social relationship are their respective countries. Individuals, as such, can lay claim to protection against the harms of the trading system, including trade-related domestic policies. But further egalitarian claims, concerned with relative gains or losses, are held by their respective societies.
What is Risse and Wollner’s (2019) argument for internal principles?
Trade is a ground of justice
According to Risse and Wollner, the gains of trade are distributed justly if these gains are obtained without exploitation, where exploitation is unfairness through power, unfairness being the failure to proportionately satisfy all relevant claims
They also claim to provide a principle for the distribution of gains from trade independent of wider concerns of justice.
The principle holds that it is objectionable if actor’s contributions to the production of goods of the provision of services do not make them better off to the extent warranted by the value of these contributions.
What is Walton’s (2020) criticism of Risse and Wollner’s (2019) argument?
Walton: The exploitation principle given by Risse and Wollner contrasts to the way an integrationist account deals with exploitation; whereas Risse and Wollners principle locates the issue directly in the distribution of gains of trade, the integrationist account locates the issue as the distribution being insufficiently responsive to how such a share of gains of trade sits within broader domains.
Walton: Whereas there isn’t much difference in outcome in examples of exploitation when a starving individual has extremely small wages, it is more obvious when the person receiving a small share has better background circumstances; an integrationist account would see this as less problematic, whilst Risse and Wollner’s principle should see it as also bad. To get around this they claim this only applies when terms aren’t voluntary but this limits it’s applicability and goes against the view that voluntarily accepted terms can be exploitative. Also, in order to determine what is and isn’t voluntary requires an account of exploitative circumstances, resulting in a movement towards procedural integrationism.
What is Wenar’s (2008) argument about trade and stolen goods?
Much of trade currently involves the trading of stolen goods, because the principle that resources of a country belong to the people of that country is violated daily when natural resources are seized by violence and threat
This violation of people’s property rights happens when authoritarians sell the resources of the country in global commerce allowing them to capture for themselves the money that consumers around the world spend.
Citizens of the country cannot find out what deals are being made and cannot or are too fearful to protest them; the money that is made is often used to further control citizens.
Since these dictators cannot rightly sell the resources, such as oil, the foreign corporations that purchase them do not have the right to them and are trading in stolen goods, and whilst they may claim to be innocent good faith purchasers, it is very unlikely that they are as for this to be the case they would need to be unaware of the fact that the conditions for an owner to authorize sales are not being met in some countries despite the fact that this is made clear by authoritative standards
Governments such as the US should block corporations within their jurisdictions from purchasing natural resources from severely repressive regimes. Then tariffs which extract from imports the value of the natural resource taken should be imposed on the governments that continue to purchase these natural resources, and the money raised in the tariffs should be placed in a trust to be given back to the people from the country that owns the resources when minimal conditions of civil liberties and political rights are met
What is Young’s (2006) social connection model related to trade?
Obligations of justice arise between persons by virtue of the social processes that connect them; political institutions are the response to these obligations rather than the basis.
Some of these social processes are structural processes and some harms come to people because of structural processes.
For some issues obligations of justice extend globally because some structural social processes connect people across the world.
Social connection is prior to political institutions.
The example of global injustice Young gives is Sweatshops; there is a complex production and distribution chain involved in bringing clothes to big-name retailers across the world and those at the bottom face injustices
Structural injustice - Social structure is a process which exists in the action and interaction of persons which take place on the basis of past actions and have future effects beyond their original intentions. Structural injustice exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities
The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes
What is Ronzoni (2006)’s conception of background injustice?
Ronzoni: A problem of background justice may arise at the global level, and we may have a duty to end global background injustice.
Obligations of socioeconomic justice arise from engaging in specific forms of interaction, as when interaction of the relevant kind raises problems of background justice this triggers the obligation to establish an appropriate basic structure (including specific institutions) for socioeconomic justice. (This does not challenge basic tenets of practice-dependence thesis (which James’ is) that the justice of a practice depends on the nature of that practice, that practices are clearly specified systems of rules, and that there are no problems of justice where there are no relevant practices but says that sometimes the only instrument to tackle the injustice consists of establishing a new practice)
Appropriate regulatory principles are to be established from a bottom-up perspective, starting from the problems of background justice that we encounter.
For background conditions to be just states need to be able to exercise sovereignty, regulate justice-relevant socioeconomic dynamics and interact as free and equals with each other
Background conditions are unjust when transactions cannot be conducted according to the normative criteria that apply to the morality of those very transactions. Relevant problematic transactions differ in domestic and global case so different This approach cuts dichotomy of cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan approaches.
Kinds of regulation are needed.
What is Christensen’s (2017) argument for why free trade needs restriction?
Whilst free trade may in some cases be necessary for justice, it is often not sufficient; trade justice requires that gains from trade be distributed in an egalitarian manner, and if gains from trade must be distributed in a certain way, free trade cannot alone be regarded as fair trade.
Trade exposes identifiable individuals to certain harms; if we take seriously the demands of justice, we must either prevent these harms or ensure they can be justified.
The best approach lies in the middle of fully integrationist and isolationist approaches.
Trade must be restricted to protect humans from serious physical harms.
We can endorse free trade in a wide range of goods, and among a wide range of states, while also believing that the scope of free trade should be limited, that certain goods should not be traded with certain states.
The permissibility of restricting trade will still depend on who is imposing restrictions upon whom. Developing states can be justified in restricting trade with developed states (e.g., in order to prevent the destruction of infant industries), and developed states can be justified in restricting trade with other developed states (e.g., in order to guard against cultural degradation), but a developed state may not permissibly restrict trade with a developing state when doing so will undermine the latter’s ability to escape from poverty.
