The concept of exploitation brings many of our ordinary moral intuitions into conflict. Exploitation—or to use the commonly accepted ordinary language definition, taking unfair advantage—is often thought to be morally impermissible. In order to be permissible, transactions must not be unfair. The claim that engaging in mutually beneficial transactions is morally better than not transacting is also quite compelling. However, when combined with the claim that morally permissible transactions are better than impermissible transactions, these three imply the counterintuitive claim that (...) it is obligatory to engage in mutually beneficial transactions. In this paper I outline the conditions that comprise this ‘paradox of exploitation’ along with a solution that involves replacing one of the original conditions with a condition I call Weak Non-worseness. The solution captures the priority of our concerns about exploitation by making a concern for the fairness of a transaction subsidiary to a concern for the welfare of the would-be exploited. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In 'Rethinking the Good', Larry Temkin makes two core claims. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, such cases threaten the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’. I argue that the goodness of a distribution may indeed depend on what other distributions are feasible. But contrary to Temkin, I also argue that transitivity holds even when the goodness of a distribution depends on the (...) feasible set of which it is a member. (shrink)