The current philosophical debate on just international trade has moved away from purely idealistic theorizing into the direction of non-ideal theory. At the same time most philosophical thought on just trade is still rather idealistic and the main argument of the paper is that some philosophical reasoning about international trade justice should be more realistic. The paper develops in three steps. In a first step I will give a short overview over normative questions that arise with respect to international trade. (...) I will then highlight a proposal brought forward by Leif Wenar, because he is aware of the realist challenge and tries to counter it. In a second step I will discuss why it is important to integrate a realist perspective into philosophical considerations of international trade justice. Trade agreements are embedded in political contexts that influence the normative perspective one should take on trade justice. This leads to the third part of the article, where I will explore how a realist approach can go along with more idealistic perspectives, which leads to a weakly realist perspective on trade justice. (shrink)

This article identifies the main issues of justice that arise in international trade and critically evaluates contemporary philosophical debates over how to understand them. I focus on three central questions of distributive justice, as applied to trade. What is it about trade that makes it a subject of justice? Which aspects of the international trading system should our principles of justice regulate? What do duties of justice or fairness in trade demand? I show how debates over these questions turn not (...) only on empirical disagreements specific to trade but also on deeper and more general disputes in moral and political philosophy. I argue that trade is a domain in which diverse moral concerns complexly intersect and that a satisfying account of it must do justice to this complexity by itself exhibiting substantial pluralism. (shrink)

In On Trade Justice, Risse and Wollner defend an account of trade justice on which the central requirement, applying to both states and firms, is a requirement of non-exploitation. On their view, trade exploitation consists in ‘power-induced failure of reciprocity’, which generates an unfair distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with trade relationships. In this paper, I argue that while there are many appealing features of Risse and Wollner’s account, their discussion does not articulate and develop the unified picture (...) of states’ and firms’ obligations that they aim to provide as clearly as it might have. In particular, it is, I claim, unclear exactly how they understand the relationship between the fairness-based requirements that apply to states and those that apply to firms. I argue that there are two types of accounts that they might accept: a transactional account and a structural account. I offer reasons to think that there are reasons to prefer a structural account. In addition, I note some of the key implications of accepting such an account, and suggest that if Risse and Wollner accept these implications and revise other aspects of their view accordingly, the result is a plausible and unified account of what trade justice requires. (shrink)

This article identifies the main issues of justice that arise in international trade and critically evaluates contemporary philosophical debates over how to understand them. I focus on three central questions of distributive justice, as applied to trade. What is it about trade that makes it a subject of justice? Which aspects of the international trading system should our principles of justice regulate? What do duties of justice or fairness in trade demand? I show how debates over these questions turn not (...) only on empirical disagreements specific to trade but also on deeper and more general disputes in moral and political philosophy. I argue that trade is a domain in which diverse moral concerns complexly intersect and that a satisfying account of it must do justice to this complexity by itself exhibiting substantial pluralism. (shrink)

Matias Risse and Gabriel Wollner’s On Trade Justice largely neglects the role of money and central banking in ‘trade fairness.’ This article rehearses why J. M. Keynes thought money and global central banking matters for national capacity, and suggests that this helps answer Risse and Wollner’s chief objection to Aaron James’s Fairness in Practice.

Three perspectives on international trade are present in current debates. From the first perspective, trade is regarded as a set of individual transactions among consenting parties and considerations of fairness and justice barely feature, if at all. The second perspective underlines the importance of background structures for trade, maintained by states, which gives rise considerations of fairness and justice. One prominent version of this perspective, for example as defended by Aaron James, views all trading states as having in principle equal (...) claims to the gains from trade. A third perspective puts the focus on exploitation. In this special issue, Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner claim that the first perspective should be abandoned and that the type of approach that is instantiated by James fails. This article does not follow them in dismissing the second perspective in its entirety. It suggests that there is a different version of this perspective that is defensible and develops key elements of that version. In a second step, the article seeks to show that, even if there were no plausible account of fairly dividing gains from trade among states, fairness in trade would still generate demanding normative requirements – that can be and should be integrated into a theory of global justice. (shrink)

An increasingly popular approach to global justice claims we should be ‘integrationist,’ where integrationism represents an attempt to unify our theorising between different domains of global politics. These political theorists have argued that we cannot identify plausible principles in one domain, such as climate justice, which are not sensitive to general moral concerns. This paper argues we ought to reject the concept of integrationism. It shows that integrationism is either trivial, or it obscures relevant disagreement by ignoring the distinctive methodological (...) and substantive commitments held by its opponents. The paper then argues that the relevant disagreement is actually about the role of practices for political philosophy and, as such, should be framed in terms of the distinction between practice-dependent and practice-independent theory. Finally, I provide my own account of that distinction, identifying a practice-dependent claim that those concerned about the narrowness of prominent accounts of global justice should target. (shrink)