In this article I attempt to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about reliance in a systematic way. I argue that reliance is a cognitive attitude that has a tighter connection to the guidance of our thought and action than ordinary belief does. My main thesis is that reliance has a ‘constitutive aim’: namely, it aims at guiding our thought and action in a way that is sensible from the standpoint of practical or theoretical ends. This helps explain why reliance is, in contrast to belief, typically formed and revised in response to pragmatic considerations.

This paper will articulate and defend a novel theory of epistemic justification; I characterize my view as the thesis that justification is potential knowledge (JPK). My project is an instance of the ‘knowledge-first’ programme, championed especially by Timothy Williamson. So I begin with a brief recapitulation of that programme.

While openmindedness is often cited as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue, the connection between openmindedness and truth is tenuous. Several strategies for reconciling this tension are considered, and each is shown to fail; it is thus claimed that openmindedness, when intellectually virtuous, bears no interesting essential connection to truth. In the final section, the implication of this result is assessed in the wider context of debates about epistemic value.

James's Fairness in Trade seeks to offer an account of fair trade that is “internal” to an existing practice he describes as “mutual market reliance.” This paper distinguishes several senses of the distinction between “internal” and “external” that occur in the book and asks how, in its various senses, the distinction shapes and influences judgments about the fairness of the practice.

I explore some interpretations of the practice of international market reliance that forms the focus of Aaron James’ book, and I wonder how our actual practices help to settle what we should go on to do now.

In his important recent book, Aaron James has defended a principle – Collective Due Care – for determining when a form of economic integration is morally objectionable because it causes unjustified harm (including unemployment, wage suppression and diminished working conditions). This essay argues that Collective Due Care would yield implausible judgements about trade practices and would be too indeterminate to play the practical role for which it is intended.

In his account of fairness in international trade, Aaron James distinguishes autarkic gains from the gains of trade. Since the autarkic gains are external to the practice of trade, James's account allows each country to keep these gains. The gains of trade, in contrast, must be distributed equally. This distinction suffers from three problems. First, James's autarkic adjustment not only allows inequalities to persist, but exacerbates and creates new ones. Second, there is no non-morally arbitrary way to determine the autarkic gains. Finally, by favouring his account over more egalitarian options, James does not merely set autarkic gains aside as external to the practice of trade but rather implicitly endorses a moral entitlement to autarkic gains without argumentation.

This discussion responds to important questions raised about my theory of fairness in the global economy by Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, A.J. Julius and Kristi Olson. I further elaborate how moral argument can be ‘internal’ to a social practice, how my proposed principles of fairness depend on international practice, how I can admit several relevant conceptions of ‘harm’ and why my account does not depend on a problematic conception of societal ‘endowments’.