Distributive Justice and Trade in Natural Resources

The normative discussion on the role that trade in natural resources plays in distributive justice revolves around the concept of property, primarily in the form of a people’s collective property rights over its country’s resources (Pogge 1994, Wenar 2008). While this view corresponds with the tenets of international law and a plethora of state constitutions, its theoretical foundations are quite fragmented, encompassing both consequentialist and deontological arguments. From both of these perspectives, philosophers propose embargoes as a tool to rectify injustices in distribution of natural resources, particularly focusing on countries with undemocratic governments that steal the resources from their people and on combatting the so-called resource curse. The aim of this paper is to identify a policy proposal for trade in natural resources aimed at promoting distributive justice that would be theoretically consistent, if there is one. In order to set up this investigation, I critically engage with the proposals in question to determine the most suitable approach for the further search for its theoretical foundation. Unlike Pogge, Wenar offers an account with a clear deontological emphasis, which can be summarized as the enforcement of property rights in international commerce. While his view on property is well founded, the focus on popular sovereignty over natural resources is based solely on the legal mainstream. Having established that Wenar’s Clean Trade is the most promising candidate for a well-grounded policy proposal, I proceed to present two philosophical traditions that prima facie can serve as a foundation for his ideas, each associated with a key normative issue in the discussion: (i) liberal nationalism and territorial rights (Miller 2012, Moore 2012), and (ii) left-libertarianism and property rights (Steiner and Vallentyne 2000, Otsuka 2003). I demonstrate that the Clean Trade policies can be considered left-libertarian due to the special normative status of natural resources that these policies assert by limiting to resources both the act of theft from a country’s population and the response in the form of an embargo. Left-libertarianism endows the resources with this special status as humanity’s common property, which is derived from the limits on original appropriation outlined in the Lockean and the Egalitarian Provisos, whereas liberal nationalism attributes to the resources no particular normative status, treating them as a part of the territorial rights bundle. In Wenar’s proposal, the special resource-related demands of justice can be shown to be present on all three levels of Nozick’s entitlement theory: justice in acquisition, transfer, and rectification (1974). Meanwhile, trade in manufactured goods with dictatorial regimes remains untargeted by Wenar’s propositions. I also examine other key features of Clean Trade, focusing on their compatibility with liberal nationalism and left-libertarianism, including (1) lack of government accountability as the trigger for resource embargoes (2) the understanding of citizens as their country’s shareholders, and (3) the nation-state as the sole unit of consideration. A theoretical basis for the discussion of trade in natural resources and global distributive justice could inform the employment of Clean Trade policies as a tool in the pursuit of a broader left-libertarian global justice project (e.g., Steiner 1999).