Fair Trade and the Fetishization of Levinasian Ethics

A recent paper in the Journal of business ethics (Staricco 2016) measures fair trade against Levinasian ethics. Our paper is a critic of that paper. We want to show that (1) Levinasian ethics is not necessarily the best normative reference for evaluating fair trade. This means that his fetishisation of Levinasian ethics in fair trade is not a valid idea, (2) the author commits a methodological error when he argues that fair trade should be evaluated with regard to an ideal normative criterion, and (3) his distorted view of fair trade does not accurately reflect the fair trade movement, and he commits another methodological error by confusing fair trade with a sole practice, whereas the movement is based on a multiplicity of ramifications and practices.