| Title | |
| The TRIPS Agreement and John Rawls’s Theory of International Justice | |
| Author | |
| Eric Min-Chiuan Wang | |
| Keywords | |
| John Rawls, international justice, the Law of Peoples,Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) | |
| Abstract | |
| The topic of this article is how the theory of international justice developed by political philosopher John Rawls in the mid-1990s can be applied to analyzing TRIPS, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and its drafting process. The purpose here is to construct a point of view for the critique of TRIPS. Rawls’s theory of international justice was primarily developed in his The Law of Peoples but also bore imprints from the previous works, including A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. The author of this article has intended to apply several concepts proposed by Rawls in these works, including the second stage of the original position, the veil of ignorance, modus vivendi, and overlapping consensus. Many issues relating to TRIPS’ drafting process are in effect the questions that Political Liberalism has intended to answer; these issues include the fundamental disagreement over the function of an international intellectual property regime and the disproportionate burdens placed on the developing countries. This article concludes by suggesting that a process for reaching an overlapping consensus over the goal of international intellectual property should be developed, probably, within the institutional structure of the WTO. |
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