Abstract
I challenge an influential analysis (the ‘participation account’) that attributes human rights violations to the global economic system, and attributes complicity with those violations to citizens of affluent countries. The participation account is shown to rest on a faulty account of wrongful action. An alternative, and superior, account of wrongful action (the ‘agency account’) is proposed, and used to analyse the rules of the global economic order. These include the ‘foreground rules’ of trade agreements and the ‘background rules’ of state privileges. The agency account identifies wrongful action with unreasonably imposing losses/risks. The systemic bad effects of the economic system and its rules are shown not to be due to agents in the system acting unreasonably in this sense. The metaphor that the economic system ‘violates rights’ and that we act in complicity with this are thus shown not to stand up to analysis.
Highlights
Rules This brings me to the background rules that define the limits of trade institutions.The states system limits the possibility of systematic global redistribution and permits separate governments to pursue economic policies that can be detrimental to their own citizens
The existence of systemic poverty depends on the causal network of choices that is the market: individual actions of trying to consume, sell, produce and win market shares, in addition to the absence of certain safeguards such as regulative intervention, redistributive measures, public service provision, investment and so forth.At the level of the global system of trade the actors in this network do not coordinate their actions with the recognisable aim of producing the negative effects
Nor is failure to reform the system to establish a global authority that could regulate trade.There may be imperfect duties to work towards a better system, but the absence of reform could only be a violation where it was shown that specific agents acted negligently in omitting specific actions with reasonable costs.Wholesale fundamental reform of international authority is clearly not a negligent omission of that kind, as I discuss below
Summary
I challenge an influential analysis (the ‘participation account’) that attributes human rights violations to the global economic system, and attributes complicity with those violations to citizens of affluent countries. The existence of systemic poverty depends on the causal network of choices that is the market: individual actions of trying to consume, sell, produce and win market shares, in addition to the absence of certain safeguards such as regulative intervention, redistributive measures, public service provision, investment and so forth.At the level of the global system of trade the actors in this network do not coordinate their actions with the recognisable aim of producing the negative effects They do not, participate in a collective wrongful action in the sense of C. Nor is failure to reform the system to establish a global authority that could regulate trade.There may be imperfect duties to work towards a better system, but the absence of reform could only be a violation where it was shown that specific agents acted negligently in omitting specific actions with reasonable costs.Wholesale fundamental reform of international authority is clearly not a negligent omission of that kind, as I discuss below
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