Why Dependence Grounds Duties of Trade Justice
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Why Dependence Grounds Duties of Trade Justice Tadhg Ó Laoghaire1 Accepted: 10 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This essay asks what it is about the practice of trade that grounds duties of justice between states as trade partners. The answer advanced is that such duties are grounded in the dependence that trade generates. The essay puts forward four conditions that a plausible account of grounding in trade must meet: it must admit of degrees, explain the distinctly international character of trade justice, ground both procedural and distributive duties, and it must be a necessary feature of all trade relationships which generate duties of justice. A dependence account of grounding meets all four conditions, and does so in an intuitively compelling way. While other accounts of what grounds duties of trade justice can meet some of the conditions, none can meet all of them. Relative to rival candidates, then, the dependence account provides a firmer foundation for the ongoing attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of trade justice. Keywords Trade · Dependence · Grounds of justice · Relationism · International justice
Introduction This essay asks what it is about the practice of trade that grounds duties of justice between its participants. More specifically, it asks what it is that grounds duties between states at the governmental level of trade. While justice will often be a salient consideration in the context of trade, this salience is not always best explained by pointing to the existence of a trade relationship. Where there is a duty to tackle immiserating poverty or environmental destruction, for example, these are not the types of duties that must be observed only when dealing with one’s trading partners. In other cases, however, even though it seems like considerations of justice apply, it is difficult to make sense of this without making appeal to what trading partners owe one another as trading partners. We might need to appeal to such trade-based * Tadhg Ó Laoghaire [email protected] 1
Inter‑Disciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) Centre, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
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considerations in cases where the benefits and risks of a trade relationship fall unevenly between trade partners, or where states make favourable entry into their own markets conditional on trade partners’ implementation of domestic reforms, or where state subsidies give otherwise inefficient domestic industries a competitive advantage in international markets. Even if a justification for each of these is forthcoming, that justification will be owed to trade partners as trade partners. To know what kinds of justifications will pass muster, we need to explain what it is about being a trade partner that grounds distinct duties of justice. In this essay, I argue that it is the dependence that trade generates which grounds duties between trade partners. The argument will proceed as follows. In the next section, I will argue that an account of what grounds duties of trade justice must b
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