Our federal tax bill contributes to the harmful inequality in our country and needs to be revamped to ensure that everyone pays their fair share. We are called upon to invest in a society that meets the needs of all, especially those on the margins of the economy; This is a fundamental principle of our doctrine. Tax reform is expected to make the tax code more progressive, raise revenues to support important programs, and reduce inequality. Tax justice will be a step towards closing the gap between income and wealth and towards an inclusive society and economy. Given the complexity of the debate on fairness in international taxation, a caveat is in order: this article is not intended to provide an exhaustive presentation of all sorts of arguments about the correct understanding of fairness in international taxation, the role of justice in tax policy, and the specific options by which implementation could be achieved. have been proposed. Because of this limitation, the criticism made here does not affect the validity of other arguments put forward in favour of an increased role for the judiciary in international taxation. This applies in particular to representations of how and why the status quo in international taxation should be considered unfair, which do not concern the apportionment obligations for the redistribution of tax rights between States. A comprehensive taxonomy of justice considerations would certainly include procedural and corrective calculations.
A comprehensive treatment of the issue must also include an analysis of international tax competition and the fairness issues caused by tilted “rules of the game”, as well as the role played by international institutions such as the OECD and WHO in shaping international tax policy according to the interests of those who have the most influence and power at their drafting and negotiating tables. John Rawls characterized justice as the first virtue of institutions; Rawls, A Theory of Justice (n 11) 110, describes social justice as the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social life. The following paragraphs deal with two different ways of achieving global justice in the sense of moderate cosmopolitanism: first, the ideas of the philosophical literature that accompany radical structural reforms, particularly with regard to the distribution of tax rights; and secondly, ways to achieve global justice without fundamentally changing the current multi-layered system of international tax law. Nagel formulates his position in two arguments. First, following Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the link between justice and sovereignty: judicial duties depend on an enforcement mechanism that only a sovereign can guarantee – without a legal system supported by a state monopoly on the use of force, coordination of behavior and stability of expectations among a large group of people cannot be achieved.45 Second, egalitarian justice is reinforced by collective responsibility for The rules of a State determine: Their addressees are not only subjects, but at the same time the authors of these rules. If we take this “co-authorship” seriously, the claim to the validity of state rules can only be legitimized by the fact that they can be equally justified vis-à-vis all the addressees concerned. Often, the duties of distributive justice, which exist directly vis-à-vis the recipient state as an authoritative moral subject, are simply assumed. However, this does not fit well with the methodological individualism of cosmopolitan theories. The intuitive power of cosmopolitan theories crucially depends on their fundamental assumption that it is the status of human beings as individual human beings, capable of acting morally, that forms the basis of the duties of distributive justice towards them, and which calls for a reason to limit these duties according to criteria such as membership in a political community. Apparently arbitrary from a moral point of view. Thus, when cosmopolitanism is used to extend the moral perspective beyond national borders, it is prima facie surprising that relations between states themselves are governed by the same principles of distributive justice as between individuals. Interestingly, cosmopolitan literature is divided and sometimes opaque as to whether the monistic claim that justice means the same thing and demands the same thing both nationally and internationally is an assertion about the relationship between individuals or between groups – such as states – or a combination of both.
If we are prepared to accept considerations of justice – among other criteria such as efficiency and manageability – as legitimate principles in shaping international tax policy, it is essential to reflect on the concrete content of these principles of justice and to examine controversial issues. Otherwise, the theoretical considerations and their practical implications remain vague and, for this reason alone, may have few political and legal implications. At least for now, this means that without an international legal system with a quasi-state monopoly on the use of force outside individual states, there is no basis for the application of distributive justice as a political ideal. An individual right to tax rights makes little sense from the outset, since the tax is not an individual, but necessarily a collective enterprise. We can understand individual rights to a certain share of socio-economic resources to access livelihoods, and the income generated by a certain share of the tax rights carried by a political entity to which individuals belong usually has an impact on the resources to which they have access. However, the debate on international tax justice oscillates between the socio-economic rights of individuals and the collective obligations of states to respect those rights through reforms of international tax law. The following sections are devoted to three groups of philosophical theories that provide different answers to the questions described above and have decisively shaped the discussion of the scope of distribution tasks in recent decades.