Pluralism in Practice: Moral Legislation and the Law of the WTO After Seal Products
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and morally motivated legislation of the WTO's Member states. Building on our 2012 article entitled Permitting Pluralism, we argue that the WTO should adopt a pluralistic approach to morally motivated legislation of its Member states. That is, WTO law should allow the greatest latitude possible for states to adopt morally motivated legislation, and should permit all types of moral and religious reasons for restricting international trade, including non-instrumental moral reasons. The WTO should not attempt to second-guess the moral and religious commitments of its Members, and it should permit morally complex legislation, involving trade-offs and multiple, possibly competing, motivations. Instead the WTO should confine its role to a thorough analysis of any discriminatory aspects of the measure to determine whether the measure is protectionist. This approach is justified by the WTO's institutional capacity and purpose, when understood in historical context. After articulating this pluralist approach, we analyze the recent EC-Seal Products dispute at the WTO, a watershed WTO case on morally motivated domestic legislation, to determine whether the WTO's adjudicatory bodies adopted an appropriate attitude to the European Union's legislation banning the importation of seal products for explicitly moral reasons, out of concern for animal welfare. We argue that the Seal Products case largely followed our pluralist approach, adapting the law of the WTO to accommodate non-instrumental moral reasons for regulating by WTO Member states. Finally, we defend the Seal Products decision against criticisms that have emerged in the scholarly literature, including those that have criticized our pluralistic approach to morally motivated legislation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".