Abstract

I argue that Alan Wertheimer’s account of unfair advantage-taking, though flawed, is more plausible than his critics believe. Indeed, I argue that his proposed model for assessing fair exchange – the friendship model – according to which a transaction’s terms are unfair to the extent that they deviate from the terms upon which we’d expect good friends to transact – is compelling and can serve as the basis for a plausible theory of wrongful exploitation. Wertheimer, I argue, was wrong to think that friends would transact at “hypothetical market prices.” But he was right to think that friendship norms can provide a plausible account of fair exchange. In this paper I develop a friendship-based account of wrongful exploitation and I argue that it has important advantages over rival theories.