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Reply to critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Aaron James
Aaron James*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, UC Irvine, 96 Humanities Office Building, Irvine, CA92697-4555, USA
*
*Email: aaron.james@uci.edu
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Abstract

This discussion responds to important questions raised about my theory of fairness in the global economy by Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, A.J. Julius and Kristi Olson. I further elaborate how moral argument can be ‘internal’ to a social practice, how my proposed principles of fairness depend on international practice, how I can admit several relevant conceptions of ‘harm’ and why my account does not depend on a problematic conception of societal ‘endowments’.

Keywords

global economyfairnesssocial practicesharmgains of tradeendowments
Type
Author meets Critic
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 286 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2014

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References

Notes

1. See this volume. All of my critics are responding to Aaron James, Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hereafter FP.

2. What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

3. For the principles, see pp. 203–204 of FP.

4. It is perhaps telling that Dworkin's own view of international law (‘A New Theory of International Law’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (2013)) is messier than his domestic account. The present point may help his argument: the positivist argument from state consent, which Dworkin is resisting, arguably imposes clarity and order where we should not expect it.

5. This is true even as success in interpretation may also bolster other theoretical virtues. For instance, consider the argument that capitalism is in recent decades wrought with moral corruption. The case for this might be best mounted given a highly sympathetic conception of its deeper social understandings – of promises of wealth made but unfulfilled – instead of a revolutionary morality that rejects its very existence.

6. Indeed, as a general matter, arguments from harm or the imposition of risk are not at all straightforward from a moral point of view. See my ‘Contractualism's (Not So) Slippery Slope’, Legal Theory, Volume 18, Issue 3 (2012).

7. ‘Critical Notice of Aaron James's Fairness in Practice, ’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 43, Issue 3 (2013): p. 394.