The Call For Ethical Trading
Deepak Lal
Thursday,
There is a movement afoot in the West which poses a serious threat to the future prosperity of developing countries. This is the demand by many activists and politicians (like Clare Short, the UK overseas development minister) for "ethical trading". They would like the WTO to promote this by adopting labour and environmental codes.
Activists have already succeeded in browbeating many businesses to label goods as ethically produced, e.g without cruelty to animals, or destroying the rain forests, or without using child labour as certified for instance by the Rugmark label.
There are two points to be made. The first, can be made succinctly. I was on a TV programme recently with Ralph Nader, one of the chief proponents of this stance in the US. He was banging on about the wickedness of the WTO in its resolute refusal to accept any discrimination in trade based on country of origin or method of production. He particularly emphasised the wickedness of trading with countries which produced goods with child labour.
In exasperation, I was forced to ask if when Nader went to buy his meat he enquired whether the butcher had beaten his wife before he made his purchase.
This took him aback. But the point is a general one. If we bring morality into trade then we will be forced to make "windows into people's souls". All trade, whether domestic or foreign, would become impossible. There would be no limit to the dissension that would result even within the moral systems of the West.
To give just one example, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a devout Christian who considers homosexuality to be morally repugnant as it is not in consonance with the Bible. Would he be justified in banning imports from the West which are produced by homosexual labour, primarily in the US entertainment industry? Would this not outrage Nader and other Americans who do not consider homosexuality to be immoral but a valid life-style?
They would, no doubt, take refuge in an argument based on "human rights." Mr Mugabe could not ban goods using gay labour as it would infringe the human rights of the gays, but Americans can ban goods produced by Third World child labourers, as this promotes the human rights of these children. But are there any such rights, and would they prohibit child labour? This is the second major question that arises.
Note that claims based on 'human rights' are a modern variant of 'natural rights', and their existence must be based on the assumption that being human in some sense provides a moral justification for certain rights. These rights, if they exist, would be moral or general rights, to be distinguished from the specific rights associated, for instance, with specific legal or social systems or those which arise when promises are made.
That there is nothing logically necessary and hence universal about the existence of 'general' rights is borne out by their repudiation by many western moral codes, e.g the utilitarian. As Bentham famously wrote: "Right is the child of law; from real laws come real rights...Natural rights is simply nonsense on stilts".
Suppose, however, we grant, as many western philosophers do, that there is one general right, namely "the equal right of all men to be free". This liberal notion of individualistic (negative) freedom will not satisfy Marxists who have identified various social and economic rights (positive freedom) which are in effect statements of desirable conditions of life for every human being.
It is these which form the backbone of the demand for 'fair labour standards' as a matter of human rights. But as many western philosophers (notably Isiah Berlin and Herbert Hart) have noted, claims based on general or moral, social and economic rights are based on terminological confusion surrounding various notions of freedom and the failure to distinguish between a right and a morally right action. The two are not the same.
Thus an infringement of (negative) freedom must constitute an injury, which is a failure of justice and, therefore, demands for restitution would be just. By contrast, it maybe morally right to attempt to alleviate poverty, but failure to do so would merely be a failure to what is good. It would not be a failure to render what is due as in the case of a right to poverty alleviation.
Most of the positive freedoms being touted are, therefore, no more than the specific rights granted by western societies as part of their welfare states. They are the result of specific restraints and guarantees built into a particular country's legislation and would apply only to its citizens. No general moral right could thereby be adduced to apply to all mankind.
But perhaps a prohibition of child labour can be justified as infringing the general right of (negative) liberty - if it exists. It is widely recognised in most societies that children do not become full moral beings at the moment of birth.
The purpose of various initiation ceremonies are rites of passage, as well as the conferring of various specific political and legal rights (and corresponding obligations) on children at the age of majority, signifies the link between the ability to make rational moral choices and being a full-fledged moral person.
Before this adult status is achieved there are particular rights that children have to parental 'care' which are counterbalanced by the partial ownership rights that parents have in their children. A good analogy for the resulting relationship between parents and their children would be that the former are trustees of the incipient rights which the latter will acquire as full adults.
From this position of trusteeship would flow both the obligations for parental care and children's obedience. Furthermore, given the resulting partial ownership of their children, the parents would have some coercive rights (for instance, to force them, against their infantile wills, to go to school or learn the piano or eat spinach). But these coercive rights cannot be absolute. Parents clearly would not have the right to sell their children into slavery.
But what of parents sending their children to work in varying circumstances? Clearly, again, no general prohibition against such work would seem to flow from either the trusteeship role of the parents and the general rights (current or incipient) of the children.
A parent who trains his child to be a carpenter at an early age and allows the fruits of the child's labour to be sold cannot be said to have infringed any of the child's general rights (including those which are incipient and of which he is a trustee). The same argument would seem to hold for restrictions on other forms of child labour.
Although certain types of child labour may not be morally right, it is unclear how such work would infringe any general right (actual or incipient) of the child.
Thus even within the corpus of western moral thinking, it is clear that there is no case for banning child labour in the name of 'human rights'. Such a ban would merely reflect a particular evaluation of what is morally right, and given the divergence of moral views, it would be as reprehensible as banning 'gay' labour on moral grounds.
The call for ethical trading is therefore nothing else but a rhetorical device to conceal the ongoing western attempt to resurrect protectionism against the Third World. It must be firmly resisted.
The author is James S Coleman Professor of International Development Studies, University of California, LA.
Thursday, February 5, 1998
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