Fairness in international economic cooperation: moving beyond Rawls’s duty of assistance

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that Rawls’s duty of assistance offers an incomplete picture of our international social and economic responsibilities. I will start by presenting the two main interpretations of the ‘Rawlsian circumstances of egalitarian distributive justice’ – the first requiring the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of cooperation, the second the existence of a ‘certain kind’ of interaction with the will – and then show that none of them rules out the applicability of international principles of egalitarian distributive justice. My argument will draw on societies’ participation in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). So, in the second section I will show that even though this organization is not endowed with a centralized coercive authority, its participants are asked to accept significant constraints on their behaviour and are therefore owed a special justification for these constraints. I will also suggest that the alleged voluntariness of this organization may not only be contested (especially when developing societies are involved), but may also not be sufficient to rule out requirements of distributive equality. In the third section, I will show that, as any system of cooperation, the WTO gives rise to requirements of fairness and that, given the purpose it claims to serve, not all inequalities that can be traced back to so-called ‘domestic’ factors can be considered justified. More specifically, I will argue that the fairness of the WTO requires that all its participants be given a fair chance of benefiting from global market competitions, and that this is likely to entail significant egalitarian distributive duties among societies.

Keywords:

• global distributive justice
• World Trade Organization
• John Rawls
• equality of opportunity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexia Herwig, Marco Goldoni, George Pavlakos, Andrea Sangiovanni, Ronald Tinnevelt, Nicholas Vrousalis and the anonymous reviewers for relevant discussion or helpful comments on issues addressed here.

Notes

1. The condition of ‘rough equality’ holds that ‘individuals are roughly similar in physical and mental powers; or at any rate, their capacities are comparable in that no one among them can dominate the rest’ (Rawls 1999a, pp. 109–110). Hence Rawls’s contention that ‘the fundamental problem of social justice arises between those who are full and active and morally conscientious participants in society’, which supposes that ‘everyone has sufficient intellectual powers to play a normal part in society, and no one suffers from unusual needs that are especially difficult to fulfil, for example, unusual and costly medical requirements’ (Rawls 1999c, p. 332).

2. Two remarks are worth mentioning here. The first is that Reidy holds trade with burdened societies to be morally problematic because it is likely to involve coercion and deeply unequal bargaining power. One of the background conditions for free and fair trade is therefore that it takes place between well-ordered peoples. Trade with burdened societies should for its part be conducted in the light of the duty of assistance and aimed at bringing these societies to well-orderedness (Reidy 2007, pp. 201–202). The second remark is that Reidy does not deny that inequalities between well-ordered peoples may undermine the voluntary character of their trade relations, but he believes that the proper remedy to this type of unfairness is likely to be transactional rather than distributive (p. 231).

3. International human rights regimes purport to protect and to promote the rights individual persons through the adoption of international measures; in some cases, these included provisions for adjudication and enforcement, and allow individuals with human rights complaints to freely and equally petition a human rights court (cf. the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the European Court of Human Rights), or they included an authorization to prosecute individuals alleged to have committed grave international crimes (cf. the International Criminal Court).

4. To be sure, Blake derives the specifically egalitarian distributive character of this justification from the fact that part of what domestic tax law and private law coercively define is a system of private holdings and entitlements. But in connection with this, it may be pointed out that an association need not involve a body of tax law and private law applying directly to individuals in order to influence the repartition of resources both across and within societies. So, by regulating and monitoring international trade relationships, an organization like the WTO is clearly involved in determining how property rights get acquired, transferred and lost.

5. There are two main reasons why WTO members may disagree with the content of the WTO agreements to which they have nevertheless signed up. The first is that they are asked to accept all WTO agreements as a ‘single undertaking’, that is, as a whole package, with no possibility to selectively apply only those agreements that are to their advantage. The second is that they may not have been fully aware of the consequences of some complex agreements, especially in regard to intellectual property rights.

6. As Stephen Krasner has pointed out, developing countries tend to prefer more authoritative international regimes, with well-defined rules and significant enforcement capacity, especially because of the greater measure of stability and predictability such regimes can introduce in international relations (Krasner 1985). On the related idea that the lack of a coercive and regularized international legal system may not only facilitate the harmful treatment of weaker states, but also be the result of stronger states using their power to their own advantage (also Pevnick 2008, pp. 404–405).

7. To be precise, Abizadeh writes that ‘According to any plausible cooperation theory, justice presupposes only social interaction, not cooperation’ (my emphasis). But since what he is concerned with in his article are the Rawlsian principles of justice and their connection with the basic structure of society, we can assume that what he has in mind in this assertion is not simply ‘justice’, but ‘egalitarian distributive justice’.

8. Abizadeh bases his interpretation on the distinction Rawls makes between ‘merely socially coordinated activity – for example, activity coordinated by orders issued by an absolute central authority’ and social cooperation which ‘includes the idea of fair terms of cooperation’ (Rawls 2001, p. 6). Now, it is true that Rawls’s conception of social cooperation incorporates a moral dimension: an association cannot qualify as a genuine system of cooperation (as opposed to system of brute force) unless certain minimal conditions are met – it must be committed to the good of each of its members and integrate a certain measure of reciprocity. However, Rawls does not seem to regard the satisfaction of these conditions as being sufficient to make a system of cooperation into a fair system of social interaction. So when he defines basic human rights as minimal conditions of social cooperation, what he means is not that an association that respects them can be regarded as fair, but rather that an association that fails to respect them cannot possibly be fair.

9. A similar point is made by James (2005, p. 549) and Moellendorf (2005, pp. 149–150).

10. This does not mean that the adoption of special or differential treatment can never be justified, but rather that there is a prima facie requirement not to depart from the principle of non-discrimination. See also note 13.

11. For an explicit statement of this view, see James (2005). For the related, but slightly different view that societies (or at least, well-ordered societies) are to be held responsible for their policy decisions and are therefore entitled to the advantages that may result from these decisions (Miller 2005, 2007, Rawls 1999b, pp. 117–118).

12. Questions can also be raised about the very idea of ‘domestic’ factors: it can indeed be wondered whether a considerable part of what societies ‘bring with them’ when engaging in the WTO is not already the outcome of certain forms of international cooperation, especially if these are taken to also include deliberate non-doings (e.g., refraining from disrupting or blocking the smooth running of other societies understood as domestic systems of social cooperation). On similar ideas, see Heath (2006).

13. It is worth noting that the latter option may run counter to the requirement of formal fairness: however desirable measures akin to positive discrimination may be in bringing about substantive fairness, the fact that they allow exceptions to the rules of a competition can indeed be seen as undermining the requirement that all those who are engaged in a competition must be treated according to the same criteria.