Responsibility and Global Labor Justice

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.