INTRODUCTION

At first glance, it would seem that agricultural support is the wrong case to pick for this application. After all, its resolution calls for lifting governmental farm controls and letting markets operate freely, quite the opposite of what the preceding chapters have been saying all along on the need for extra-market interventions to rectify unintended consequences. On the contrary, agricultural protectionism is an ideal case with which to illustrate the utility of this study's conceptual framework, for three reasons. In the first place, such farm support is fundamentally about coping with adverse pecuniary externalities and averting their resultant economic compulsion – indeed, much along the lines of this book's point on the need for collective moral agency to take responsibility for ameliorating economic distress. Second, such public assistance is not a simple matter of dealing with a single episode of harmful market ripple effects. It turns out to be a more complicated case of multiple but related instances of economic compulsion in both wealthy and poor nations, and of having to sift through their competing claims against each other. One could argue, for example, that states have a primary moral obligation to the economic rights to life and subsistence of their own citizens compared to noncitizens both at home and abroad (Raphael 1967: 65–66). Thus, there is an additional ethical issue of whether countries are morally justified in protecting their own farmer-citizens from economic compulsion in the marketplace even at the expense of inflicting economic distress on other nations' farmers.