No, Matt, look at your actual words, which I helpfully quoted above although apparently not in a font of your liking. Not “It seems to me that X”. Not “seems to be X”. What you said was “X, it seems, in a way that’s pretty straightforward”. Given that the context is you accusing me of dishonesty, I would have thought that you’d take particular care not to give the slightest appearance of an impression of a suspicion that you were trying to rewrite history for your own convenience.

The word you are looking for is “sorry”.

Matt, it was done to me, by you; you kicked up a fuss about “it seems” (which really isn’t a magical qualifier that allows you to walk away from an assertion when it turns out to be incorrect) but didn’t even mention, still less highlight “pretty straight-forward”. And now you’re trying to call me dishonest, because I quoted your full sentence but didn’t change the font on two words which you’d already picked out? Listen to yourself.

I maintain my view that “stipulating that international legal arrangements which benefit corporations and harm ill people in poor countries can definitely be ruled out” is a fair paraphrase of the quoted sentence, and am content to allow anyone else who cares to make up their own mind on the subject. My original intention from post 39 onwards was simply to defend myself against a very serious accusation, but your claim that I’m dishonest or a liar now seems to have got so very silly and trivial that I think I can afford to let it slide. Apologies to Chris for the short threadjack.

On the question whether I was “lying” or “making shit up” (accusations which I always take very seriously, by the way), a glance at post #20 reveals that the sentence in question was:

But, subsidies to create an artificial comparative advantage or to bankrupt a weaker country (US Cotton subsidies probably fall in the former) or restrictions that are otherwise quite harmful and serve primarily to protect powerful corporate interests (such as at least some of the IP restrictions pushed by the US and EU in many recent trade agreements) would, it seems, fail the requirement of being acceptable to reasonable and rational parties representing societies behind a veil of ignorance in a way that’s pretty straight-forward on Rawls’s account

“Pretty straightforward”? It looks to me as if you’re being pretty disingenuous yourself here, as well as very patronising. As far as I can see, you’re no longer defending the assertion that the IP restrictions suggested by the EU and US in Seattle in 1999 could be rejected “in a way that’s pretty straightforward on Rawls’s account”. So perhaps some recognition that I was right on this point and you were wrong would be a little bit more in order than just baldly asserting that I would know how stupid I was if only I had grasped the nuanced majesty that is Rawls. If you think there’s a relevant point I’ve missed, then either tell me what it is or alternatively, try keeping one of your frequently broken promises to stop talking to me. Your choice, but calm down and have a cup of tea before you make it.

But it’s the actual state of play in a lot of the world and for a lot of history. Most natural resources economies have historically been dependent on foreign mining technicians, for example. Coercive trade relations of the sort that Chris is talking about have been very important in the development stories of lots of countries.

But I think that the main point here is that as you say, lots of different arrangements are acceptable under the Rawlsian theory, and in particular an arrangement where OECD pharmaceutical companies are allowed to deprive middle-income/poor countries of medicine in order to keep the price up in the USA, is basically one of those distributions above the sufficiency level between which we’re allowed to be indifferent. As I say, the point of Rawls’ theory is to create some space for inegalitarian distributions internationally, so it’s not a surprise that it does in fact achieve this aim, but I don’t see any basis for Matt’s view that he can put himself on the politically more popular side of the TRIPS issue by stipulating that international legal arrangements which benefit corporations and harm ill people in poor countries can definitely be ruled out.

But that isn’t quite the Cohen view, is it? The Cohen view is that a principle that obtains in circumstance C and not in circumstance not-C has to be governed by an ueber principle that explains why that’s so. Because the ultimate ueber principles take account of all possible states of the world, their nature isn’t determined by any particular state of the world obtaining. So his position isn’t that, say, the difference principle isn’t applicable only in particular circumstances, but, rather that its dependence on contingent facts means that the DP cannot be an ultimate principle of justice.

Yes, but ….

1. I don’t think I need to commit here to the strong claim that fully egalitarian norms kick in with trading activity, just to the weaker one that we shouldn’t be indifferent between distributions that satisfy the sufficiency requirement. (i.e. sufficiency isn’t the whole story.) Your incentives claim, which I now understand, depends on a stronger claim than I need make here.

2. I think there’s a relevant moral difference between there being, contingently, no trading contact and a collective decision to ban or to break off trading. The first of these puts me in mind of Parfit’s divided world; the second does not. Obviously there’s much more to be said, but I doubt that a decision to cease trading gets you out of your distributive obligations as easily as you suggest.

Dsquared – I confess I don’t fully follow the example. Tell me more about the first round of TRIPS. I will say that I don’t think Brazilians have a right to any of Pfizer’s profits – but I don’t think Americans have a right to them either. For that matter, I don’t think Pfizer shareholders have a right to them in the relevant sense. I think that property rights are political creations, so Pfizer shareholders only have a claim to those profits to the extent that US law says they are entitled to them because they have done various things to acquire them. This doesn’t mean that any legal system of property rights is okay. On the contrary, I think that’s exactly what the principles of justice apply to. But I do think that there are many different schemes that could be legitimate and different countries will legitimately choose different schemes. Philosophical questions about international trade are questions of how these different schemes should (or may) hook up to each other. Global economic institutions which tell us how to do this are therefore parasitic on legitimate domestic schemes of property.

I do want to explore your point about parallel imports a little more. You say that although making them illegal is one thing, “preventing them is more or less impossible.” I believe you that it may be expensive and that companies may find it more profitable simply to refuse to supply certain markets. I’ll have to think about this some more, but the right thing to say here may be that we simply have to rely on a second-best solution – one that indirectly approximates what would happen if a fully just IP agreement could be implemented. But now look at your stipulations to flesh out Chris’s example – you say that Poorland only produces widgets but that they can’t produce them – in other words, they can’t produce anything – without Richland-trained technicians. I already said that justice might require economic adjustment assistance, but more generally, this scenario seems objectionably unrealistic to me. If you can invoke leaky borders with respect to the re-importation of drugs, is there a reason I can’t invoke technology transfers and the spread of production information? Chris – there might be a deep issue of philosophical method lurking here and this is another point that is likely to come up in the discussion of Cohen: must principles of justice be applicable to all conceivable circumstances or can we invoke certain empirical assumptions about the circumstances in which they will be applied (i.e. what’s “realistic”)?