Ethics and International Trade: A Tale of many Connections

In recent decades a growing number of philosophers have started to pay attention to the ethics or morality of international economic integration. In this paper, we offer an overview of the normative questions related to international trade (see Barry and Wisor, 2014; De Bres, 2016; Miller, 2017; Wollner and Risse, 2014 ). International trade is only a subset of global economic activity. Other topics that are not discussed in this paper include, for example, the international implications of domestic monetary policy choices for poverty and development (Reddy, 2003), the relationship between Sovereign bond markets and democracy or self-determination (Dietsch, 2016) , tax competition, fiscal sovereignty and distributive justice (Dietsch, 2015) , the moral justification (or lack thereof) for capital mobility (James, 2013), the effectiveness and/or desirability of international aid (Chatterjee, 2004). The paper has 8 parts. The first offers a conceptual definition of trade as economic exchange in the presence of political borders, and outlines the basic economic rationale for conducting trade, namely, the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage. The second highlights the legal, institutional and governance dimensions of international economic exchange and related ethical questions. The basic message is that international trade is not natural, but a deeply artificial institutional project that has evolved over time. The third addresses trade policy tools, such as tariffs, quotas, and export subsidies, to name just a few. Trade has never been completely free, and the policy tools governments use to encourage or restrict trade pose morally relevant questions of their own. The fourth section refines the logic of comparative advantage introduced in part I of the essay by explaining the basics of the Heckscher-Ohlin model of economic integration and thus introducing the idea that trade has distributive effects within participating countries. This fact naturally leads us to ask what relationship exists between trade and distributive justice, but also proves useful as an insight into the causes of the rise of populist parties in Western countries. Parts five and six deal with the ethics of, respectively, production and consumption. The global disintegration of production has contributed to highlight the degrading working conditions faced by many workers around the world and naturally leads us to ask questions concerning labor exploitation in traded sectors within developing economies. Yet traded goods not only need to be produced, but they also must be consumed. This brings to the fore the role of rich countries’ customers and more broadly, the idea of ethical consumerism. At this juncture the idea of fair-trade labelling standards is also introduced and briefly discussed. Parts seven and eight concentrate on two specific international markets, the market for natural resources and the market for weapons. The geopolitical significance of both markets is rather obvious. So too is the fact that they are ‘big business’ within the global economy. The paper details some of the ethical or moral questions raised by these two markets and more specifically, the problem related to the ownership of natural resources which often turn them into stolen goods, and the justifiability of, and limits to, the international sale of arms.