There are two opposing views concerning intuitive cases of wage exploitation. The first denies that they are cases of exploitation at all. It is based on the nonworseness claim: there is nothing wrong with a discretionary mutually beneficial employment relationship. The second is the reasonable view: some employment relationships can be exploitative even if employers have no duty towards their employees. This article argues that the reasonable view does not completely defeat defences of wage exploitation, because these do not rely (...) solely on the nonworseness claim. They also rely on the idea, popularised by Alan Wertheimer, that exploitation is a form of disequilibrium price occurring in defective markets. The article then proceeds to criticise Wertheimer’s account through neoclassical, new institutional, and Austrian economics. It concludes that considerations for economic efficiency are irrelevant to assessing intuitions regarding exploitation. (shrink)

How could it be wrong to exploit—say, by paying sweatshop wages—if the exploited party benefits? How could it be wrong to do something gratuitously bad—like giving to a wasteful charity—if that is better than permissibly doing nothing? Joe Horton argues that these puzzles, known as the Exploitation Problem and All or Nothing Problem, have no unified answer. I propose one and pose a challenge for Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem.

Whether an action is morally right depends upon the alternative acts available to the agent. Actualists hold that what an agent would actually do determines her moral obligations. Possibilists hold that what an agent could possibly do determines her moral obligations. Both views face compelling criticisms. Despite the fact that actualist and possibilist assumptions are at the heart of seminal arguments in business ethics, there has been no explicit discussion of actualism and possibilism in the business ethics literature. This paper (...) has two primary goals. First, it aims to rectify this omission by bringing to light the importance of the actualism/possibilism debate for business ethics through questions about the ethics of sweatshops. Second, it aims to make some progress in the sweatshop debate by examining and defending an alternative view, hybridism, and describing the moral and practical implications of hybridism for the sweatshop debate. (shrink)

It is widely thought that firms that employ workers in “sweatshop” conditions wrongfully exploit those workers. This claim has been challenged by those who argue that because companies are not obligated to hire their workers in the first place, employing them cannot be wrong so long as they voluntarily accept their jobs and genuinely benefit from them. In this article, I argue that we can maintain that at least many sweatshop employees are wrongfully exploited, while accepting the plausible claim at (...) the core of many defenses of sweatshops, namely that engaging in a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction with a person in need cannot constitute morally worse treatment of that person than doing nothing at all to benefit her. We can do this, I claim, by accepting that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to employ or otherwise benefit the global poor. I argue that these duties can be plausibly grounded in the fact that potential sweatshop workers are victims of global structural injustice, from which multinational corporations typically benefit. (shrink)

Many believe that employment can be wrongfully exploitative, even if it is consensual and mutually beneficial. At the same time, it may seem third parties should not do anything to preclude or eliminate such arrangements, given these same considerations of consent and benefit. I argue that there are perfectly sensible, intuitive ethical positions that vindicate this ‘Reasonable View’. The view requires such defense because the literature often suggests that there is no theoretical space for it. I respond to arguments for (...) the clearest symptom of this obscuration: the so-called nonworseness claim that a consensual, mutually beneficial transaction cannot be ‘morally worse’ than its absence. In addition to making space for the Reasonable View, this serves my dialectical goal of encouraging distinct attention to first- and third-party obligations. (shrink)

This paper argues that two single-factor accounts of exploitation are inadequate and instead defends a two-factor account. Purely distributive accounts of exploitation, which equate exploitation with unfair transaction, make exploitation pervasive and cannot deliver the intuition that exploiters are blameworthy. Recent, non-distributive alternatives, which make unfairness unnecessary for exploitation, largely avoid these problems, but their arguments for the non-necessity of unfairness are unconvincing. This paper defends a two factor account according to which A exploits B iff A gains unfairly from (...) B and either A believes that the gains he receives in the transaction wrong B, or A is culpably unaware that the gains he receives in the transaction wrong B. This account avoids the problems of non-distributive approaches and also delivers the intuition that exploiters are blameworthy. (shrink)

This article advances what it calls the ‘Impossibility Result’: it is impossible to claim that the reduction of exploitation leads to the improvement of efficiency. The Impossibility Result is the inevitable result of the proposed conceptual difference between ‘injustice’ and ‘exploitation’. Injustice occurs when one member of a society deviates from the norms and the legal rules concerning how one should treat other members of that society. Exploitation occurs when one member of a society takes advantage of entities such wild (...) animals, cattle, a field of vegetables, or other people that lie outside the boundary of that society. In many cases of exploitation, the exploited may derive some benefit, as in the case when enslavement is better than death. In other cases of exploitation, the exploited may derive zero benefit, called here ‘harm’, as in the case when a deer is hunted. (shrink)

In Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong (2003), I argued that the major non‐Marxist “ethically thick” approaches to exploitation were not successful in capturing what we find morally objectionable in paradigmatic cases of exploitation. My argument there focused on the consequentialist account of exploitation defended by Robert Goodin. Here I revisit the question of whether the recent multi‐level act consequentialist account of exploitation defended by Richard Arneson is successful. I raise questions about the nature of the account, and (...) conclude that it is a possibly coherent and ultimately inadequate account of the wrongness of exploitation. (shrink)