What is the basis for arguing that a volunteer army exploits citizens who lack civilian career opportunities? How do we determine that a doctor who has sex with his patients is exploiting them? In this book, Alan Wertheimer seeks to identify when a transaction or relationship can be properly regarded as exploitative--and not oppressive, manipulative, or morally deficient in some other way--and explores the moral weight of taking unfair advantage. Among the first political philosophers to examine this important topic from (...) a non-Marxist perspective, Wertheimer writes about ordinary experience in an accessible yet philosophically penetrating way. He considers whether it is seriously wrong for a party to exploit another if the transaction is consensual and mutually advantageous, whether society can justifiably prohibit people from entering into such a transaction, and whether it is wrong to allow oneself to be exploited.Wertheimer first considers several contexts commonly characterized as exploitive, including surrogate motherhood, unconscionable contracts, the exploitation of student athletes, and sexual exploitation in psychotherapy. In a section outlining his theory of exploitation, he sets forth the criteria for a fair transaction and the point at which we can properly say that a party has consented. Whereas many discussions of exploitation have dealt primarily with cases in which one party harms or coerces another, Wertheimer's book focuses on what makes a mutually advantageous and consensual transaction exploitive and analyzes the moral and legal implications of such exploitation. (shrink)

Exploitation is interacting with another in a way that takes unfair advantage of that person. Exploitation is thought to be morally wrong even when it would bring about the best attainable outcome, hence conflicts with the consequentialist morality that holds one ought always to do whatever would bring about the best outcome. This essay aims to reconcile norms against exploitation and act consequentialism. A puzzle about exploitation is raised and resolved.

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)

Is exploitation always unjust? Is it by definition unjust? If we answer both these questions negatively, as I do, then we need to ask: when is exploitation unjust and when is it not? Exploitation is the use of a vulnerability for the exploiter's ends. This is sometimes morally wrong, even when it is not unjust. But it is unjust when it violates the exploited person's rightful freedom. When is labor for hire exploitative? Whenever the terms of the (...) labor contract permit either the employer or the employee to make use of the vulnerability of the other. But when is such exploitation unjust? When it involves the ownership by either of the conditions of life of the other, because then one is in a position of control over the other and deprives the other of a free mode of life. In capitalist wage labor, this is often the case—the employer, or a class to which the employer belongs, owns the conditions of life for the employed. When this is so, the employed do not have the free life which is basic to human rights. (shrink)

Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to educate them about the nature of their oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. The coercive and exploitative aspects of the phenomenon are exemplified by the unpaid nature of the educational labor and its associated opportunity costs, the double bind that marginalized persons must navigate when faced with the demand to educate, and the need for additional labor created by (...) the default skepticism of the privileged. I explore the connections between epistemic exploitation and the two varieties of epistemic injustice that Fricker (2007) identifies, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. I situate epistemic exploitation within Dotson’s (2012; 2014) framework of epistemic oppression, and I address the role that epistemic exploitation plays in maintaining active ignorance and upholding dominant epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

This paper analyses exploitation and class formation in a dynamic context. An intertemporal model of a subsistence economy is set up and, among other results, it is proved that, in an interior equilibrium, Differential Ownership of (Scarce) Productive Assets is an inherent feature of a capitalist economy, while exploitation tends to disappear in the long run. Asset inequality is therefore proved to be a normatively secondary (though causally primary) wrong. It is also argued that these results raise several (...) doubts about the possibility of providing robust micro-foundations to Marxian concepts by means of Walrasian general equilibrium models. (shrink)

There are concerns that participation in open science will lead to various forms of exploitation – of researchers and scholars in low-income countries and under-resourced institutions. This article defends a contrary thesis and demonstrates the exact ways the underexplored notions of communal relationships, human dignity and social justice – and the normative principles to which they give rise – grounded in African philosophy can usefully address critical concerns regarding exploitation in the sharing of research resources to facilitate open (...) partnership/collaboration and reuse. Further research is required to study the specific roles different institutions can play in facilitating open practice and contribute towards establishing effective structures that can enhance equity and balance unfavourable power asymmetries. (shrink)

Informing others about the world is often a helpful act. In this paper, I study agents who conduct experiments to gather information about the world, committing in advance to fully disclose the nature of the experiment together with all experimental findings. While this appears to be a benign activity, I characterize a type of exploitative informing that is possible even within this restricted setup. I show how exploitative informants use public experiments to predictably manipulate interlocutors’ beliefs and actions to their (...) own advantage. I discuss epistemic and practical grounds on which it may be permissible for agents to resist acts of exploitative informing, then conclude by discussing implications for epistemic injustice and duties to gather evidence. (shrink)

This essay analyzesexploitation in biomedical research in terms ofthree basic elements: harm, disrespect, orinjustice. There are also degrees ofexploitation, ranging from highly exploitationto minimally exploitation. Althoughexploitation is prima facie wrongful,some exploitative research studies are morallyjustified, all things considered. The reasonan exploitative study can still be ethical isthat other moral considerations, such as theautonomy of the research subject or the socialbenefits of research, may sometimes justifystudies that are minimally exploitative. Calling a research project exploitative doesnot end the debate about the (...) merits of thestudy but invites one to ask additionalquestions about how the study is exploitative,and whether the study is justifiablenevertheless. (shrink)

Critics fault rational choice theory for dubious assumptions and limited explanatory power. The aims of rational choice are, however, as much normative as explanatory, and I argue that an abiding concern of political thought—the wrong of exploitation—gives moral weight to some of the more substantive assumptions underlying many rational choice prescriptions.

Scholarship aiming to describe the wrongness of exploitation, especially when it is voluntary and mutually beneficial, has increased greatly in recent years. In this paper, I expand the scope of this discussion by highlighting a set of additional ethical concerns associated with many cases of mutually voluntary and beneficial exploitation. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of persons desperately seeking out and gratefully accepting exploitative interactions raises special moral concerns. The element of voluntariness is key to understanding how (...) and why some exploitative interactions are degrading to exploitees. When an exploitative offer does not allow the exploitee sufficient progress toward a decent minimum of human functioning, these offers can create what I call a 'demeaning choice', where the exploitee may either accept the status quo or accept an offer that improves the exploitee's insufficiently. In these cases, the exploitee's participation in the interaction contributes to its demeaning quality, creating a form of `surface endorsement' of the treatment that she receives. (shrink)

We argue that we should provide extra payment not only for extra time worked but also for the extra risks healthcare workers (and those working in healthcare settings) incur while caring for COVID‐19 patients—and more generally when caring for patients poses them at significantly higher risks than normal. We argue that the extra payment is warranted regardless of whether healthcare workers have a professional obligation to provide such risky healthcare. Payment for risk would meet four essential ethical requirements. First, assuming (...) healthcare workers do not have a professional obligation to take on themselves the risks, payments in the form of incentives would preserve autonomy in deciding what risks to take on oneself. Second, even assuming that healthcare workers do have a professional obligation to take on themselves the risks, payments for risk would create fair working conditions by avoiding exploitation. Third, payments for risk would make it more likely that public healthcare systems can discharge their institutional responsibility to provide healthcare in circumstances where healthcare workers may otherwise (perhaps legitimately) opt out. Fourth, payments for risk would guarantee an efficient healthcare system in pandemic situations. Finally, we address two likely objections that some might raise against our proposal, particularly with regard to incentives, namely that such payments or incentives can themselves be coercive and that they represent a form of undue inducement. (shrink)

Exploitation locates what it is we recognize as bad when we judge a situation to be exploitative. Ideal for courses in social and political philosophy, public policy, or political science.

This paper offers a normative exploration of what exploitation is and of what is wrong with it. The focus is on the critical assessment of the exploitation of workers in capitalist societies. Such exploitation is wrongful when it involves a contra-solidaristic use of power to benefit oneself at the expense of others. Wrongful exploitation consists in using your greater power, and sometimes even in making other less powerful than you, in order to get them to benefit (...) you more than they ought to. This account of exploitation is appealing because it simultaneously captures three morally significant dimensions of exploitation—its material and social background, the relational (interpersonal and systemic) attitudes it enacts, and the final distributive results it generates. Exploitation is indeed a multidimensional social process. The flipside of the proposed critical characterization of this process is a positive ideal of solidaristic empowerment in the allocation and use of economic power, which the paper articulates in terms of the socialist Abilities/Needs Principle (“from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”). The Abilities/Needs Principle is grounded in human dignity. (shrink)

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

Care exploitation pervades our lives. Consider the public school teachers who care about helping children achieve their goals by providing them with a proper education and are expected to do so by parents, administrators, or legislators—even with abysmal pay and little appreciation. Perhaps the most common case of care exploitation is the expectation of a mother to make great (and disproportionate) sacrifices in her life for the well-being of her child, which mothers often meet because they bear a (...) caring orientation toward their child. Despite their willingly assenting, there is something morally problematic about their treatment. I argue that an injustice has been perpetrated against them, drawing on interpersonal accounts of exploitation to highlight that the unique wrong of care exploitation is the failure to respect one’s dignity by taking advantage of their vulnerability of caring about. Following this, I articulate the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of care exploitation and their relationships to one another. (shrink)

There are concerns that participation in open science will lead to various forms of exploitation – of researchers and scholars in low‐income countries and under‐resourced institutions. This article defends a contrary thesis and demonstrates the exact ways the underexplored notions of communal relationships, human dignity and social justice – and the normative principles to which they give rise – grounded in African philosophy can usefully address critical concerns regarding exploitation in the sharing of research resources to facilitate open (...) partnership/collaboration and reuse. Further research is required to study the specific roles different institutions can play in facilitating open practice and contribute towards establishing effective structures that can enhance equity and balance unfavourable power asymmetries. (shrink)

When discussing exploitation, we often say things like this, “sweatshop laborers have terrible working conditions and are paid almost nothing, but they are better off with that labor than with no labor.” Similarly, in describing the Non-Identity Problem, Derek Parfit points out: we cannot say that the individuals born in future generations are worse off because of our destructive environmental policies because the particular people living in those future generations wouldn’t even exist if it were not for these destructive (...) policies. How can we explain these cases, exploitation and environmental destruction, as ones of wrongdoing when the victims in both cases are no worse off than they would have otherwise been? This paper investigates the link between these two moral puzzles and ultimately uses one to solve the other: an exploitation solution to the Non-Identity Problem. (shrink)

It has been suggested that community advisory boards can play a role in minimising exploitation in international research. To get a better idea of what this requires and whether it might be achievable, the paper first describes core elements that we suggest must be in place for a CAB to reduce the potential for exploitation. The paper then examines a CAB established by the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit under conditions common in resource-poor settings – namely, where individuals join (...) with a very limited understanding of disease and medical research and where an existing organisational structure is not relied upon to serve as the CAB. Using the Tak Province Border Community Ethics Advisory Board as a case study, we assess the extent to which it might be able to take on a role minimising exploitation were it to decide to do so. We investigate whether, after two years in operation, T-CAB is capable of assessing clinical trials for exploitative features and addressing those found to have them. The findings show that, although T-CAB members have gained knowledge and developed capacities that are foundational for one-day taking on a role to reduce exploitation, their ability to critically evaluate studies for the presence of exploitative elements has not yet been strongly demonstrated. In light of this example, we argue that CABs may not be able to perform such a role for a number of years after initial formation, making it an unsuitable responsibility for many short-term CABs. (shrink)

The exploitation of human by human is a globally pervasive phenomenon. Slavery, serfdom, and the patriarchy are part of its lineage. Guest and sex workers, commercial surrogacy, precarious labour contracts, sweatshops, and markets in blood, vaccines or human organs, are some contemporary manifestations of exploitation. What makes these exploitative transactions unjust? And is capitalism inherently exploitative? This book offers answers to these two questions. In response to the first question, it argues that exploitation is a form of (...) domination, self-enrichment through the domination of others. On the domination view, exploitation complaints are not, fundamentally, about harm, coercion or unfairness. Rather, they are about who serves whom and why. Exploitation, in a word, is a dividend of servitude: the dividend the powerful extract from the servitude of the vulnerable. In response to the second question, the book argues that this servitude is inherent to capitalist relations between consenting adults; capital just is monetary title to control over the labour capacity of others. It follows that capitalism, the mode of production where capital predominates, is an inherently unjust social structure. (shrink)

The paper refers to selected issues of exploitation in the face of justice. The analysis is based on the definitions of exploitation contained in the Penal and Civil Codes. The main goal is the identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the recognition of exploitation as being unjust. A supplementary question will refer to a specific type of justice which should be considered in this case. In this respect, we should consider retributive, distributive and social justice. (...) Another important factor in this regard is the accepted theory of value. In the presented considerations, we will focus on the labour theory of value. The principal issue can be expressed by the questions whether exploitation is ipso facto unjust and how the phenomena of exploitation and justice are related to each other. (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)

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)

In turn, the volume explains how an understanding of these contract law doctrines can be enhanced by a proper conception of exploitation.

‘Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalised knowers to educate them [and others] about the nature of their oppression’ (Berenstain, 2016, p. 569). This paper scrutinizes some of the purported wrongs underpinning this practice, so that educators might be better equipped to understand and avoid or mitigate harms which may result from such interventions. First, building on the work of Berenstain and Davis (2016), we argue that when privileged persons (in this context, educators) repeatedly compel marginalised or oppressed (...) knowers, to not only to educate them, but indeed others, about the nature of their oppression, they risk subjecting them to further epistemic-moral harms. This is due to the likelihood that at least some of their audience will assign them less/more credibility than they deserve based on pre-existing identity-based prejudices. Second, though some of these requests to ‘educate’ or ‘learn more’ masquerade as seemingly virtuous or innocuous epistemic inquiries, privileged persons underestimate or remain ignorant of secondary harms which stem from internalized epistemic obligations, oppressive double-binds (Hirji, 2021), and attendant emotional burdens oppressed knowers carry in relation to the ever-present possibility of ameliorating oppressor mindsets. After surveying each context-specific harm briefly, we then turn to an applied reading of how these exploitative practices sometimes culminate in something we refer to as ‘ontic burnout’, a form of interminable explanatory fatigue brought on by repeated requests to educate the privileged about what it means to be oppressed. (shrink)

Motivated by exploitation concerns, we argue for the importance of participant engagement in basic human intracranial electrophysiology research. This research takes advantage of unique neurosurgical opportunities to better understand complex systems of the human brain, but it also exposes participants to additional risks without immediate therapeutic intent. We argue that understanding participant values and incorporating their perspectives into the research process may help determine whether and to what extent research practices and the resulting distributions of risks and benefits constitute (...) exploitation and contribute to building a brain research paradigm that is genuinely responsive to participant values. More broadly, we highlight the importance of paying attention to participant interests in non-therapeutic brain research. (shrink)

Consensus is lacking among research ethicists on the question of how broadly to understand the requirements of non-exploitation in international clinical research. Two types of principles have been proposed, minimalist and non-minimalist, grounded in two opposing conceptions of exploitation, transactional and systemic. Transactionalists have offered principles, which, it has been argued, are satisfied by minimal gains to vulnerable subjects measured against an unjust status quo. Systemicists have advanced principles with decidedly non-minimal mandates but only by conflating the obligations (...) of clinical research with those of First World citizenship. My aim here is to break this deadlock by offering grounds for a non-minimal requirement of international research ethics grounded in a transactional conception of exploitation. I do this by arguing that a subject's gains must be measured not only within the transaction, relative to her own starting point and to the share of gains enjoyed by her co-transactor, but also across transactions, so as to ensure parity of benefit to trial participants whenever, and wherever, parity of burden is assumed. (shrink)

This paper assesses the ‘power-induced failure of reciprocity’ account of exploitation in the domain of trade. I argue that its proponents face a dilemma. Either the cost variable of reciprocity is understood to include opportunity costs. Then, the account implausibly implies that those with more valuable outside options should get a larger part of the overall benefits of cooperation. Or the cost variable is understood to exclude opportunity costs. Then, the account has awkward implications in cases where direct costs (...) and opportunity costs are substitutable. To evade this dilemma, the account could be amended to include a hypothetical baseline that equalizes opportunity costs. But then, the account ceases to be isolationist. Whether a cooperative interaction counts as exploitative is no longer independent of moral considerations about distributions outside the domain of trade. (shrink)

The concept of exploitation plays a key role in Marx's attack on capitalism. No one denies this. Yet there is much confusion as to just what Marx's concept of exploitation is.Recent discussions tend to fall into two groups. In the first are those which offer extensive analyses of Marx's concept of alienation, but seldom mention ‘exploitation’. When writers in this first group do mention ‘exploitation’ they mistakenly assume that the concept is transparent and unproblematic.The second group (...) has little to say about alienation, but does attempt an account of exploitation. These writers mistakenly confine Marx's concept of exploitation to the labor process itself. Both approaches fail to articulate important connections between alienation and exploitation. (shrink)

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy monolingual adults' performance on a serial reaction time task and a self‐paced reading task, we show how individual differences in statistical pattern learning are reflected in readers' knowledge of (...) linguistic co‐occurrence patterns and in their exploration and exploitation of content‐specific and task‐general information. First, we investigated the extent to which an individual's pattern learning correlates with his or her sensitivity to systematic morphological and syntactic co‐occurrences, as evidenced while reading authentic sentences. We found that the stream of morphological and syntactic information has a more pronounced effect on the reading speed of, as we will label them, content‐sensitive learners in that the more probable the co‐occurrence pattern, the faster their reading of that pattern will be. Next, we investigated how differences in pattern learning are reflected in the ways in which individuals approach the reading task itself and adapt to it. Casting this relation in terms of exploration/exploitation strategies, known from Reinforcement Learning, we conclude that content‐sensitive learners are also more likely to initially probe (explore) a wider range of directly relevant patterns, which they can later use (exploit) to optimize their reading performance further. By affecting exploratory behavior, pattern learning influences the information that is gathered and becomes available for exploitation, thereby increasing the effect pattern learning has on language cognition. (shrink)

Clinical research has become a burgeoning activity in recent years, largely stimulated by the pharmaceutical industry's interest in new drugs with high marketing profiles. Several other forces fuel this thrust: the increasing dependence of academic medical institutions on research funding from industry; the need for large, efficient multicenter trials to obtain reliable and statistically significant results in the shortest possible time for drug registration purposes; and access to research subjects in countries. The intense interest in HIV/AIDS research and recent controversies (...) about revisions to the Helsinki Declaration, which have been seen by some to be motivated by the desire to facilitate exploitative research in countries, have stimulated renewed interest in the ethics of clinical research. (shrink)

Human subject trials of pharmaceuticals in low and middle income countries have been associated with the moral wrong of exploitation on two grounds. First, these trials may include a placebo control arm even when proven treatments for a condition are in use in other parts of the world. Second, the trial researchers or sponsors may fail to make a successful treatment developed through the trial available to either the trial participants or the host community following the trial.Many commentators have (...) argued that a single form of exploitation takes place during human subject research in LMICs. These commentators do not, however, agree as to what kind of moral wrong exploitation is or when exploitation is morally impermissible. In this paper, I have two primary goals. First, I will argue for a taxonomy of exploitation that identifies three distinct forms of exploitation. While each of these forms of exploitation has its critics, I will argue that they can each be developed into plausible accounts of exploitation tied to different vulnerabilities and different forms of wrongdoing. Second, I will argue that each of these forms of exploitation can coexist in single situations, including human subject trials of pharmaceuticals. This lesson is important, since different forms of exploitation in a single relationship can influence, among other things, whether the relationship is morally permissible. (shrink)

The ‘working poor’ are paid below‐subsistence wages for full‐time employment. What, if anything, is wrong with this? The extant philosophical literature offers two kinds of answers. The first says that failing to pay workers enough to live on takes unfair advantage of them; the workers are exploited. The second says that employers who fail to pay living wages default on a duty of care grounded in a special relationship; the workers are neglected. These arguments, though generally sound, provide an incomplete (...) picture of the wrongdoing involved. Neither adequately captures the intuition that a firm treats its employees not just badly, but disdainfully, by failing to pay them a living wage. My goal is to bring this particular feature of the relationship to salience. Working full‐time in return for below‐subsistence, I will argue, is an arrangement under which the worker is demeaned or insulted. This becomes apparent once we appreciate the expressive power of wages, and the intimate connection between one's labour and one's self. (shrink)

This study investigates the joint influences of three factors on the discovery of new word‐like units in a continuous artificial speech stream: the statistical structure of the ongoing input, the initial word‐likeness of parts of the speech flow, and the contextual information provided by the earlier emergence of other word‐like units. Results of an experiment conducted with adult participants show that these sources of information have strong and interactive influences on word discovery. The authors then examine the ability of different (...) models of word segmentation to account for these results. PARSER (Perruchet & Vinter, 1998) is compared to the view that word segmentation relies on the exploitation of transitional probabilities between successive syllables, and with the models based on the Minimum Description Length principle, such as INCDROP. The authors submit arguments suggesting that PARSER has the advantage of accounting for the whole pattern of data without ad‐hoc modifications, while relying exclusively on general‐purpose learning principles. This study strengthens the growing notion that nonspecific cognitive processes, mainly based on associative learning and memory principles, are able to account for a larger part of early language acquisition than previously assumed. (shrink)

Environmental justice crucially depends on issues of distributive justice. However, absent from philosophical examinations of environmental justice has been careful consideration of the role exploitation should occupy in our moral evaluations of some cases the initially present as instances of environmental injustice. This paper seeks to both motivate the importance of understanding the significance exploitation has in select cases of environmental justice, as well as provide a conceptual framework for how to assess the ethics of those cases.

We cooperate with other people despite the risk of being exploited or hurt. If future artificial intelligence (AI) systems are benevolent and cooperative toward us, what will we do in return? Here we show that our cooperative dispositions are weaker when we interact with AI. In nine experiments, humans interacted with either another human or an AI agent in four classic social dilemma economic games and a newly designed game of Reciprocity that we introduce here. Contrary to the hypothesis that (...) people mistrust algorithms, participants trusted their AI partners to be as cooperative as humans. However, they did not return AI's benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans. These findings warn that future self-driving cars or co-working robots, whose success depends on humans' returning their cooperativeness, run the risk of being exploited. This vulnerability calls not just for smarter machines but also better human-centered policies. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

It is expected that industrial heritage actually tells the story of the emerging capitalism highlighting the dynamic social relationship between the “workers” and the owners of the “production means”. In current times of economic crisis, it may even involve a painful past with lost social, civil, gender and/or class struggles, a depressing present with abandoned, fragmented, degraded landscapes and ravaged factories, and a hopeless future for the former workers of the local (not only) society; or just a conquerable ground for (...) controversial investments. This is certainly an emotionally charged subject matter, with multiple readings and interpretations. However, this view is only partial when facing landscape during its historical evolution process. A diachronic study, thus, embraces all resources that probably gave rise to a variety of human activities; all of them embody heritage values -“subjectively” or “objectively” perceived- their evaluation, though, is a matter of an on-going process of the civil society. Greece's landscape accommodates a diversity of diachronic productive practices that may overlap historical periods, technological evolutions and social transformations. Pre-, early and industrial exploitation of resources does not remain firm but vary according to time and the needs of each society. The comparative scale of certain resource exploitation is highlighted as the key for the assessment methodology in close relation to the specific frame of a local landscape and a historical period. Even though archaeological evidence may possibly reveal and document continuity in a range of sustainable productive processes without conflicts, great controversies emerge when new investments are “offered” as an antidote to economic crisis -not harmonized to the local scale, traumatizing thus the “spirit” of the landscape. Suggestions for incompatible productive use and investment planning imply irreversible and irreparable effects on the environment, society and economy of a region and are only faced through social awareness. Case studies of passive and/or active involvement of local communities, in synthesizing and enhance landscape’s “spirit”, its diachronic industrial heritage and the embedded tangible and intangible values, will support a pragmatic -not a suspended- step towards a sustainable future. Quoting Neil Cossons (TICCIH Congress 2012) “Industrial imperialism ensures its position and protects its future not by the conquest of distant lands as by the securing of its sources of raw materials ... The modern world is as much under the control of the major industrial powers as it ever was during the colonial era”; if such a case can the industrial heritage sector remain apolitical? (shrink)

The concept of exploitation and potentially exploitative real-world practices are the subject of increasing philosophical attention. However, while philosophers have extensively debated what exploitation is and what makes it wrong, they have said surprisingly little about what might be required to remediate it. By asking how the consequences of exploitation should be addressed, this article seeks to contribute to filling this gap. We raise two questions. First, what are the victims of exploitation owed by way of (...) remediation? Second, who ought to remediate? Our answers to these questions are connected by the idea that exploitation cannot be fully remediated by redistributing the exploiter's gain in order to repair or compensate the victim's loss. This is because exploitation causes not only distributive but also relational harm. Therefore, redistributive measures are necessary but not sufficient for adequate remediation. Moreover, this relational focus highlights the fact that exploitative real-world practices commonly involve agents other than the exploiter who stand to benefit from the exploitation. Insofar as these third parties are implicated in the distributive and relational harms caused by exploitation, there is, we argue, good reason to assign part of the burden of remediation to them. (shrink)

The term “exploitation” is notoriously hard to define. Yet it is frequently invoked to frame moral concerns about clinical research. Recently, a group of influential authors have proposed a so-called nonexploitation framework for the ethics of randomized controlled trials that appears to address these concerns. This article challenges one basic assumption of that framework: the idea that nonexploitation in research requires participants to be protected from excessive risks, which are understood to be risks that are not outweighed by the (...) benefits that the research is expected to lead to. Examples of exploitation in other contexts show that this idea has highly counterintuitive implications. The result is that the nonexploitation framework obscures concerns about exploitation in biomedical research, rather than clarifying them. (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)

Offering cash payments to research subjects is a common recruiting method but there is significant debate about whether and in what amount such payments are appropriate. This paper is concerned with exploitation and whether there should be a lower limit on the amount researchers can pay their subjects. When subjects participate in research as a way to make money, fairness requires that researchers pay them a fair wage. This call for the establishment of a lower limit meets resistance in (...) two places: (1) denial that the payments offered by researchers are wages for participation; and (2) concern about undue inducement. This paper critically examines these arguments for and against a lower limit. It shows that the need for a lower limit cannot be avoided by adopting a non-wage payment model and that concerns about undue inducement are unjustified in all trials except those that present greater than minimal risk. This analysis suggests the following compromise position: there should be an unconditional lower limit on payment amounts so that researchers cannot offer less than a fair wage, and when researchers cannot satisfy this limit because fairness requires a problematically large payment, then researchers should offer no payment at all. (shrink)

In Responding to Global Poverty, Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland argue that, while exploitation is morally problematic, responsibilities not to exploit are characteristically less stringent than responsibilities not to harm. They even suggest that exploiters’ responsibilities to assist the exploited may be weaker than the responsibilities of culpable bystanders who are able to help the poor but fail to do so We think Barry and Øverland underestimate the prospects of the exploitation argument. In our paper, we suggest that (...) exploitation can plausibly be understood as a kind of harm. If exploitation harms, then it requires special justification and can generate stringent responsibilities not to exploit that have a different ground than those generated by morally culpable failures to assist. This suggests an important way to rehabilitate arguments for poverty relief on the basis of a duty not to harm, and that there is more interesting territory to explore than Barry and Øverland’s arguments suggest. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts of the concept of exploitation can be grouped into camps that tie the wrongness of taking advantage of another person to: (1) the unfair division of benefits resulting from an interaction; (2) excessive benefits resulting from structural injustice; and (3) a failure of respect for others’ humanity. In practice, accounts of exploitation that focus on the fairness of benefits resulting from individual transactions and, to a lesser degree, unjust social and economic institutions have dominated the applied (...) ethics literature using the concept of exploitation. However, fairness-based accounts of exploitation have a difficult time explaining a common dimension of purportedly exploitative cases in the press and academic literature—namely the absolute deprivation of and/or experience of injustice by victims of exploitation. In this paper, I argue that a respect-based account can explain how exploitation arises both from individual interactions and against a backdrop of injustice. Specifically, our connections with one another and social and economic institutions specify the duty of beneficence and political responsibility to promote just institutions. Exploitation takes place when people fail to act on these specified obligations in favor of their own benefit. (shrink)

Contemporary theoretical discussions of exploitation are dominated by thinkers in the liberal and Marxian traditions. Exploitation: From Practice to Theory, pushes past these traditional and binary explanations, to focus on unjust practises that both depend on and perpetuate inequalities central to exploitation. -/- Using real-world examples, the chapters in this collection address key questions, including, in what ways are exploitation practices globalised, racialized and gendered? How do cases of organ selling, price gouging and commercial gestational surrogacy (...) change our understandings of exploitation? What possible social and economic remedies do these new conceptions prescribe? -/- Case studies in this volume span the globe, dealing with developed and developing countries alike and in a variety of national and transnational contexts. (shrink)

Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain our discomfort with some of these quests. At the same time the book seems particularly relevant given current events. While despair and quests for novel interventions touched (...) only a few patients with specific conditions up to a year ago, they are now familiar to us all. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic all of us probably experienced hope for interventions that could save us... (shrink)

The notion of exploitation is prominent in political discourse and policy debates. It is central in analyses of labour relations, especially focusing on the weakest segments of the labour force including women and children. It features in controversies on surrogate motherhood, and on drug-testing and the price of life-saving drugs, especially in developing countries.

In a market economy, members of professions—or at least those for whom their profession is a vocation—are vulnerable to a distinctive kind of objectionable exploitation, namely the exploitation of their vocational commitment. That they are vulnerable in this way arises out of central features both of professions and of a market economy. And, for certain professions—the care professions—this exploitation is particularly objectionable, since, for these professions, the exploitation at issue is not only exploitation of the (...) professional’s vocational commitment but also of her even more basic commitment to morality. (shrink)

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations that are preyed upon by individuals offering empty promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned as "exploiting the hope" of another. These accusations are made in a range of contexts, including human smuggling, the beauty industry, and unproven medical interventions. This concept is meant to do heavy lifting in public discourse, identifying a specific form of unethical conduct. However, it is poorly understood what is intended to be (...) wrong by exploiting hope, the range of activities that can accurately be captured under this concept, and what should be done about it. Thus, it is an ethical concept that is ripe for extended analysis and discussion. (shrink)