This paper argues that a sweatshop worker's choice to accept the conditions of his or her employment is morally significant, both as an exercise of autonomy and as an expression of preference. This fact establishes a moral claim against interference in the conditions of sweatshop labor by third parties such as governments or consumer boycott groups. It should also lead us to doubt those who call for MNEs to voluntarily improve working conditions, at least when their arguments are based on (...) the claim that workers have a moral right to such improvement. These conclusions are defended against three objections: 1) that sweatshop workers' consent to the conditions of their labor is not fully voluntary, 2) that sweatshops' offer of additional labor options is part of an overall package that actually harms workers, 3) that even if sweatshop labor benefits workers, it is nevertheless wrongfully exploitative. (shrink)

Research Articles Matt Zwolinski, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

It is commonly thought that exploitation is unjust; some think it is part of the very meaning of the word ‘exploitation’ that it is unjust. Those who think this will suppose that the just society has to be one in which people do not exploit one another, at least on a large scale. I will argue that exploitation is not unjust by definition, and that a society might be fundamentally just while nevertheless being pervasively exploitative. I do think that exploitation (...) is nearly always a bad thing, and wul try to identify the moral belief which makes most of us think it is. But I will argue that its badness does not always consist in its being unjust. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that exploitation is unjust; some think it is part of the very meaning of the word 'exploitation' that it is unjust. Those who think this will suppose that the just society has to be one in which people do not exploit one another, at least on a large scale. I will argue that exploitation is not unjust by definition, and that a society (such as Our own) might be fundamentally just while nevertheless being pervasively exploitative. I (...) do think that exploitation is nearly always a bad thing, and will try to identify the moral belief which makes most of us think it is. But I will argue that its badness does not always consist in its being unjust. (shrink)

Economic theory teaches that it is in every country’s interest to trade. Trade is a voluntary activity among consenting parties. On this view, considerations of justice have little bearing on trade, and political philosophers concerned with global justice should stay largely silent on trade. According to a very different view that has recently gained prominence, international trade can only occur before the background of an international market reliance practice shaped by states. Trade is a shared activity among states, and all (...) participating states have in principle equal claims to gains from trade. Trade then becomes a central topic for political philosophers. Both views are problematic. A third view about the role of trade in a theory of global justice is then presented, which gives pride of place to a notion of exploitation. The other two views should be abandoned. (shrink)

This paper examines the moral force of exploitation in developing world research agreements. Taking for granted that some clinical research which is conducted in the developing world but funded by developed world sponsors is exploitative, it asks whether a third party would be morally justified in enforcing limits on research agreements in order to ensure more fair and less exploitative outcomes. This question is particularly relevant when such exploitative transactions are entered into voluntarily by all relevant parties, and both research (...) sponsors and host communities benefit from the resulting agreements. I show that defenders of the claim that exploitation ought to be permitted rely on a mischaracterization of certain forms of interference as unjustly paternalistic and two dubious empirical assumptions about the results of regulation. The view I put forward is that by evaluating a system of constraints on international research agreements, rather than individual transaction-level interference, we can better assess the alternatives to permitting exploitative research agreements. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Richard Arneson criticizes the domination account of exploitation and attributes it to me and Allen Wood. In this paper, I defend the domination account against Arneson's criticisms. I begin by showing that the domination view is distinct from the vulnerability-based view defended by Wood. I also show that Alan Wertheimer's influential account of exploitation is congenial to the domination view. I then argue that Arneson's own fairness-based view of exploitation generates false negatives and (...) trivializes the concept of exploitation, rendering it entirely parasitic on the notion of unfairness. (shrink)

This paper argues that Cohen’s early work on Marxism, and his work in political philosophy, entails commitment to a distributive paradigm, that is, the view that exploitation obtains only if distributive injustice obtains. Cohen’s early espousal of that paradigm is explicitly reaffirmed in his defence of luck egalitarianism. The paper argues that Cohen’s distributive paradigm is neither the only defensible theory of exploitation, nor indeed the most plausible. It also shows that Cohen himself had doubts about the distributive paradigm, and (...) in fact came to reject it towards the end of his life. (shrink)

Sweatshop labor is often cited as an example of the worst and most pervasive form of exploitation today, yet understanding what is meant by the charge has proven surprisingly difficult for philosophers. I develop an account of what I call “Needs Exploitation,” grounded in a specification of the duty of beneficence. In the case of sweatshop labor, I argue that employers face a duty to extend to employees a wage sufficient to meet their basic needs. This duty is limited by (...) the degree of the employees’ dependence on the employer for basic needs and a reasonability standard where the employer may remain within a range of well-being between deficiency and luxury. (shrink)

In this book R. G. Peffer tackles the challenges of finding in Marx's work an implicit moral theory, of answering claims that Marxism is incompatible with morality, and of developing the outlines of an adequate Marxist moral and social ...

If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist (...) definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression. (shrink)

According to Marx one of the primary evils of capitalism is that it is exploitative-and necessarily so. Socialist and communist societies will not be exploitative and this is one of the reasons why they will in some sense be better. To understand such claims we have to determine exactly what Marx means by “exploitation” and what it is about exploitation that Marx finds to be bad. Neither of these questions is as simple as it might seem.A common misunderstanding of Marx (...) is this: exploitation consists simply in an unequal distribution of social wealth. Workers are exploited because they get so much less of the pie than do capitalists. Another interpretation of Marx's concept is that exploitation consists in the fact that workers to not get the whole pie. They produce all value and, therefore, deserve to get it all back. I will show that both of these interpretations are inadequate or simply mistaken. An error common to both is an overemphasis on distribution. (shrink)

The article considers the objection to a commercial market in living donor organs for transplantation on the ground that such a market would be exploitative of the vendors. It examines a key challenge to that objection, to the effect that denying poor people the option to sell an organ is to withhold from them the best that a bad situation has to offer. The article casts serious doubt on this attempt at justifying an organ market, and its philosophical underpinning. Drawing, (...) in part, from the catalogued consequences of a thriving kidney market in some parts of India, it is argued that the justification relies on conditions which are extremely unlikely to obtain, even in a regulated donor market: that organ selling meaningfully improves the material situation of the organ vendor. Far from being axiomatic, both logic and the extant empirical evidence point towards the unlikelihood of such an upshot. Finally, the article considers a few conventional counter-arguments in favour of a permissive stance on organ sales. (shrink)

Despite its title, Alan Wertheimer’s new book is not another tiresome exploration of Marxist economic theories. Indeed, there is virtually no extended discussion of Marxism at all, since Wertheimer believes that what is unique to that perspective is highly problematic, given that when Marxists simply assert that capitalists do exploit wage laborers they are appealing to “the ordinary notion that one party exploits another when it gets unfair and undeserved benefits from its transactions or relationships with others”. His goal is (...) to analyze this ordinary sense of exploitation, to explore in detail some of the many forms it can take, and to begin some serious thinking about what he terms its moral weight and its moral force. This groundbreaking work, the first book-length treatment of its subject from a broadly analytic standpoint, should do much to disabuse non-Marxist philosophers of the notion that exploitation is largely peripheral to the central questions of moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Protecting The Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. By Robert E. Goodin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

According to some accounts of exploitation, most notably Ruth Sample’s degradation-based account and Robert Goodin’s vulnerability-based account, exploitation occurs when an advantaged party fails to constrain their advantage in light of another’s disadvantage, regardless of the cause of this disadvantage. Because the duty of constraint in these accounts does not depend on the cause of the disadvantage, the advantaged’s duty of constraint is what I call a ‘come-what-may’ duty. I show that come-what-may duties create moral hazards that can themselves be (...) exploited by the disadvantaged parties. In such cases these accounts of exploitation are either self-frustrating or over-demanding. (shrink)

Working from a "capitalist" theory of exploitation, based on a neo-classical account of economic value, I argue that guest workers are exploited. It may be objected, however, that since they are not citizens, any inequality that stems from their status as non-citizens is morally unobjectionable. Although host countries are under no moral obligation to admit guest workers as citizens, there are independent reasons that call for the extension of economic rights – the freedom of occupation in particular – to guestworkers. (...) Since the cause of unequal exchange rests in the fact that guest workers are deprived of these rights, rather than in their exclusion from citizenship per se, I conclude that they are exploited even if their exclusion from citizenship may be justified. (shrink)

When the assertion that some agent is exploiting a person connotes that the exploitation is morally wrong, what is this wrong? Some maintain that exploitation need not involve unfair division of advantages, but instead is essentially domination for self-enrichment. This essay denies this claim and upholds the idea that exploitation claims concern unfair distribution. Some maintain that the hypothetical fully competitive market exchange price can serve, at least in some contexts, as the standard for assessing whether voluntary interaction is exploitative. (...) This essay denies that the idea of the fully competitive market price can serve in this role. Nor should we accept a pure luck egalitarian claim that would identify fair distribution with the outcome of ideally competitive markets proceeding from fair initial distribution. (shrink)

Are guest-worker programs exploitative? Egalitarian and neoclassical theories of exploitation agree that they always are. But these judgments are too indiscriminate. Privileged guests are the exception, and the exception points toward a more sensitive standard for identifying exploitation. This more sensitive standard, the sufficiency theory of exploitation, is used to analyze several guest-worker programs. Even when guest-worker programs are exploitative, it is argued that the unfairness should be tolerated if the exploitation is modest, not severe, and if the most likely (...) nonexploitative alternative worsens the plight of the disadvantaged. (shrink)

When we read Karl M&IX,S descriptions of the capitalist mode of production in Capital amd other writings, all our instincts tell us that these are descriptions of an unjust social system. Marx describes a. society in which one small class of persons lives in comfort and idleness while another class, in ever-increasing numbers, lives in want and vvrctchedncss, laboring to produce thc Wealth enjoyed by the fixst. Marx speaks constantly of capitalist "exploitation" of the worker, and refers to the creation (...) of surplus value as the appropriation of his "unpaid 1abor" by capital. Not 0nly docs capitalist society, as Marx describes it, strike us as unjust, but his own descriptions of it themselves seem to connote injustice. When we look in the writings of Marx and Engels for a detailed account 0f the injustices of capitalism, however, We discover at once that not only is there no attempt at all in their writings to provide an argument that capitalism is unjust, but there is not even the explicit claim that capitalism is unjust 01* incquitablc, 01* that it violatcs anyonds rights. We find, in fact, explicit denunciations and sustained criticisms of social thinkers (such as Pierre P:roudhon and Ferdinand Lassalle) who did condemn capitalism for its injustices or advocated some form of socialism as a. means of securing justice, equality, or the rights of man. We even find, perhaps to our surprise, some faixly explicit statements to the effect that capitalism, with all its manifold defects, cannot be faultcd as far as justice is concerned. Whatever else capitalism may be for Marx, it docs not seem that it is unjust. (shrink)

My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. (...) Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers. (shrink)