When Fair Is Not Just and Just Is Not Fair

In: The independent review: journal of political economy, Band 11, Heft 2, S. 165-176

Abstract

This essay on the debate on trade made "fair" by regulation explores the question of the subjective meanings of the terms justice & fairness to argue that imposition of the terms on trade by political authority violates the freedom of contract. The insistent & recurrent demand that international trade must be fair instead of merely free is contextualized in a brief history of the factor-price equality theorem, the impacts of globalization, the arbitrariness of status quo agreements, & the inappropriateness of sentiment to justice. The many meanings of fairness are delineated, & egalitarian sympathies are asserted to inspire doctrine. The unreputable guide of intuition to moral judgments is related to empirically learned cause-effect functions, the evolutionary & adaptive propensity to fairness that lies outside standard rational payoff maximization. A discussion of Humean conventions of property & contract is related to the creation of rules, suum cuique in the securing of title to possessions, & the force of voluntary exchange. Appeals to fairness are concluded to override the demands of justice as an adaptive behavior of evolutionary & adaptive selection, violating the freedom of contract established by the system of spontaneously adopting rules that separate the free from the unfree. References. J. Harwell