Abstract
Do people in relatively free and affluent countries such as the United States, Canada or Germany have responsibilities to try and to improve working conditions and wages of workers in far-off parts of the world who produce items those in the more affluent countries purchase? In recent years the “antisweatshop” movement has gained momentum with arguments that at least some agents in these relatively free and affluent countries do have such responsibilities. They have had rallies and press conferences, staged sit-ins and hunger strikes, all with the aim of convincing consumers, corporate executives, union members, municipal governments, students, and university administrators in the United States or Europe to acknowledge a responsibility with respect to the working conditions of distant workers in other countries, and to take actions to meet such responsibilities.
Socrates thought that, for the agent himself, doing wrong is more harmful than suffering wrong. Well, so long as it is merely a matter of ‘wrong’ done or suffered, thus a matter essentially existing in the perception of the parties, the proposition may stand…But the objectified wrong creates a new, external causality, and we are inquiring about its moral harm to the suffering side. And we ask the question not, as Socrates did, for the single actions committed and suffered here and there, but for the constant effects on the victims of a system of justice. And there the main point is that, in a system of ruthless exploitation, those objective effects mean abject poverty with all the degradation, external and internal, which this entails.
– Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Jonas (1985).
- 2.
Young, Iris Marion (2004) “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice”. The Journal of Political Philosophy Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 365–388. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
- 3.
- 4.
Fetherstone (2000).
- 5.
See also French (1984).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
I have discusses the same authors’ arguments at some more length and in a wider context of global justice in Young (2000).
- 9.
- 10.
O’Neill (1996, Chap. 4).
- 11.
- 12.
Scheffler includes members of the same nation-state in the category of these special relationships, but I think this is a mistake.
- 13.
Scheffler (2001).
- 14.
Ibid., 39.
- 15.
Arendt (1987).
- 16.
Ibid., 47.
- 17.
See George Fletcher’s discussion of the way that the assignment of criminal liability must distinguish between foregrounded deviations from background conditions assumed as normal. Fletcher (1998).
- 18.
See Jonas (1984).
- 19.
- 20.
Goodin (1995a).
- 21.
May (1993).
- 22.
Melanie Beth Oliviero and Adele Simmons recommend uses of civil society organizations for addressing issues of labour standards; see: “Who’s minding the store? Global civil society and corporate responsibility,” Glasius, M., Kaldo, M., and Anheier, H. ed. 2002. Global Civic Society, of improving labor conditions that combines state institutions and decentralized deliberative civic organizations, including those involving affected workers; Fung (2003).
- 23.
William Conolly makes a distinction similar to Arendt’s between responsibility as blame and political responsibility. For him the resentment and count-accusation dialectic that accompanies blame on a discourse of public affairs makes political identity overly rigid and paralyzes action. This he recommends a notion of political responsibility without blame and with a more fluid and ambiguous understanding of sources of wrong than the implicitly Christian identification of the sinner. See Connolly (1993). Melisa Orlie also distinguishes between a sentiment of resentment exhibited in blaming and holding oneself and others politically responsible. See Orlie (1997).
- 24.
Pogge (2002b).
- 25.
Pogge (2003).
- 26.
Murphy (2000).
- 27.
Goodin (1995b).
- 28.
Major retail firms have increasingly gained control over a vertically integrated global apparel industry. See Bonacich and Richard (2002, Chaps. 2 & 5); See Rosen (2002, Chaps. 10 &11); Some Lawyers argue for a legal strategy that would extend liability for violations of labor standards to the manufacturer who contracts out work, and not only to the contractor. See Lam (1992). Such a strategy must be pursued within a single legal system, of course, and cannot cross justifications between say, Thailand and the United States.
- 29.
For one set of debates, see Fung et al. (2001).
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Young, I.M. (2010). Responsibility and Global Labor Justice. In: Ognjenovic, G. (eds) Responsibility in Context. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3037-5_5
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