Cosmopolitan rights, global tax justice, and the morality of cooperation

The paper essentially addresses two strictly related first-order questions about morality as such that enable us to discern solutions that address second-order questions in the specific policy context of regulation of tax competition and Beps: 1) what kind of justice conception has sufficient normative support to undergird regulation attempts of this global phenomenon which ensure cosmopolitan tax rights (the Global Tax Justice question); and 2) what are the pre-conditions of effective cooperation not based on immediate self-interest which eschews a market-based approach to tax competition, enabling background conditions for the morality of multilateral cooperation (the morality of cooperation question). After this introduction about tax competition and global justice in which a normative approach is propounded to the problem, the paper addresses the first-order questions number 1) by discussing the Rawlsian premises to the concept of tax justice and its developments within the internationalist approach (section 2); the paper then shifts the focus on the cosmopolitan challenge to Rawls which introduces, at least theoretically, the possibility of fundamental right of Global Tax Justice (section 3), to then draw conclusions about three available normative options for the governance of tax competition and Beps which can be derived from the previous analysis (section 4). The paper then addresses the first-order questions number 2) by examining current literature about non-self-interested cooperation (section 4), extending this analysis to the social sanctioning of tax competition (section 5).