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Freedom and Justice in Trade Governance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Sarah C. Goff
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Abstract

Two recent books consider the future of trade governance. Consent and Trade proposes reforms to trade agreements so that states can consent more freely to their terms. On Trade Justice defends reforms to the World Trade Organization, arguing that multilateralism is the foundation for a “new global deal” on trade. Each book describes trade's distinctive features and proposes a principle to regulate both trade and trade governance. Consent and Trade defends a principle of respect for state consent in trade agreements. On Trade Justice offers a theory of trade justice that requires nonexploitation. Consent and nonexploitation are important principles for economic exchanges. However, trade governance and trade itself are different forms of cooperation, with different agents and different interests at stake. Consent and nonexploitation are less compelling as principles for trade governance than for trade itself. Both books understate the conflict between their principles for trade governance and liberal justice.

Keywords

consentexploitationfreedomcooperationglobal justiceliberalismfair trade
Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Special Issue 3: The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward , Fall 2020 , pp. 401 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 See, especially, a few of the authors’ previous books: Risse, Mathias, On Global Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Garcia, Frank J., Global Justice and International Economic Law: Three Takes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Garcia, Frank J., Trade, Inequality, and Justice: Toward a Liberal Theory of Just Trade (Transnational, 2003)Google Scholar.

2 For philosophical treatments of trade alongside other topics of global concern, see Singer, Peter A., One World: The Ethics of Globalization (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Caney, Simon, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brock, Gillian, Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an argument that applies principles of global luck egalitarianism to trade, see Christensen, James, Trade Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

3 Beitz, Charles R., Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Moellendorf, Darrel, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2002)Google Scholar; and Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

5 WTO agreements are discussed on pp. 94–105 of Consent and Trade.

6 For the definition of a regime, see Stephen D. Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 2, cited in On Trade Justice on p. 66.

7 Rather than providing a “full-blown normative account of consensual trade” (p. 41), Garcia's argument draws from his reflections about the “meaning of trade as a human experience” (p. 1). In another strand of the argument, Garcia notes that patterns of nonconsensual trade are inefficient and impose social costs (pp. 42–48). Consent and Trade also agrees with interpretations of international law that recognize a role for state consent.

8 See Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

9 See Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) on trade with “kleptocracies” that steal natural resources that rightfully belong to the people; and Christian Barry and Sanjay G. Reddy, International Trade and Labor Standards: A Proposal for Linkage (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) on trade with states that violate labor standards.

10 Others argue that societies should provide compensation for their citizens and other adjustments through their domestic policies. See Aaron James, Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 203–45; Christensen, Trade Justice, pp. 63–90; and On Trade Justice, pp. 202–31.

11 For this definition, see Todd D. Rakoff, “Contracts of Adhesion: An Essay in Reconstruction,” Harvard Law Review 96, no. 6 (April 1983) pp. 1173–1284, cited in Consent and Trade on p. 29.

12 See Shauna Valentine Shiffrin, “Paternalism, Unconscionability Doctrine, and Accommodation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 29, no. 3 (Summer 2000) pp. 205–50 on “unconscionable contracts.” See also Wenar, Blood Oil, pp. 102–22 on the essential role of domestic property laws in recognizing the rights of foreign dictators to export natural resources they have stolen from their people.

13 On developing countries’ duties to liberalize trade, even on a unilateral basis, see Fernando R. Tesón, “Why Free Trade Is Required by Justice,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no. 1 (January 2012), pp. 126–53.

14 My selected recommendations from the literature on exploitation include: Hillel Steiner, “A Liberal Theory of Exploitation,” Ethics 94, no. 2 (January 1984), pp. 225–41 on exploitation as a trilateral relationship; Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) on exploitation as unfairness; Ruth J. Sample, Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) on exploitation as degradation; and Nicholas Vrousalis, “Exploitation, Vulnerability, and Social Domination,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 41, no. 2 (Spring 2013) pp. 131–57 on exploitation as a subcategory of domination. For a theory of exploitation in global trade that is based upon a failure of beneficence, see Richard W. Miller, Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

15 The authors disagree with James's suggestion in Fairness in Practice that these gains can be estimated with any precision, due to the difficulty of distinguishing the trade regime's impact on national incomes from other sources of economic change.

16 Stiglitz, Joseph E. and Charlton, Andrew, Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Brown, Andrew G. and Stern, Robert M., “Fairness in the WTO Trading System,” in Narlikar, Amrita, Daunton, Martin, and Stern, Robert M., eds., The Oxford Handbook on the World Trade Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 677–93Google Scholar. For criticism of the idea of procedural fairness in trade negotiations, see Christensen, James, “Fair Trade, Formal Equality, and Preferential Treatment,” Social Theory and Practice 41, no. 3 (July 2015), pp. 505–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 This trade regime may fail to promote development precisely because it has fully fair procedures.

18 I believe Risse and Wollner use their generic account of exploitation as “unfairness through power” for their evaluation of the trade regime in roughly the supplemental way I have sketched. They write, “The failure to proportionately satisfy all relevant claims creates unfairness. There is exploitation if that failure is due to one party's power over others” (p. 148). This is different from their use of the specific principle of nonexploitation in trade for the purpose of evaluating the trade regime.

19 Risse and Wollner discuss a case in which an authoritarian regime is the source of a power discrepancy between domestic workers and a foreign firm (On Trade Justice, pp. 242–43). They argue that the regime and the firm exploit the workers together, in that the regime uses power to induce the workers to accept the firm's low wages and the firm derives the benefits. But it seems more likely that the regime represses workers in order to gain something for itself, such as consolidating its power. This latter scenario is a demonstration of how an exploiter (the firm) instrumentalizes vulnerability (in workers) for which a third party (the regime) is responsible.

20 See Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar for the idea of a “well-ordered” society.

21 Sarah C. Goff, “The Impact of Trade Policy on Social Justice,” Res Publica (published online April 2020), doi.org/10.1007/s11158-020-09461-5.