Exploitation

By Alan Wertheimer

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691214511

Book preview

Chapter One

OVERVIEW

PEOPLE WRONG ONE ANOTHER in numerous ways. They kill, steal, assault, injure, abuse, oppress, dominate, enslave, coerce, extort, seduce, manipulate, subjugate, lie, deceive, defraud, pry, cheat, betray, neglect, discriminate. And they exploit.¹ While I have been working on this book, I have looked and listened for instances in which it was claimed that persons or institutions were engaged in exploitation. Consider:

1. It was said that the R. J. Reynolds Company was exploiting African Americans by planning to test-market a new cigarette (Uptown) in Philadelphia that it thought would have special appeal to African Americans. ²

2. The president of Stanford University claimed that big-time college athletics reeks of exploitation, because the universities gain a great deal of revenue from the services of the athletes while the athletes (whose graduation rate is much lower than that of nonathletes) gain little from their college experience. ³

3. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, leading to an increase in petroleum prices, New Hampshire governor Judd Gregg said that his administration would not tolerate exploitation of the New Hampshire consumer as a result of the Middle East crisis. ⁴

4. Advocates for people with AIDS protested the (then) annual price of AZT ($8,000), a drug that was thought to slow the progress of HIV, claiming that the Burroughs-Welcome Company, which produces AZT, was exploiting people who were already suffering. ⁵

5. A New York Times article described the proliferation of posh strip clubs, in which topless young women dance for the customers. It was both claimed and denied that these clubs were loci of exploitation. The article noted that many believe that such bars exploit women. At the same time, many dancers say their work is no more exploitative than most other forms of employment, and the owner of one bar remarked, If anyone is being exploited it is the men, the guys buying into the fantasy of she really likes me. ⁶

6. USA Today featured an article advocating the legalization of organ sales, whereby a person could be paid cash for, say, a kidney. One reply maintained that such a policy would open wide the door to exploitation. ⁷

7. When Mary Beth Whitehead refused to surrender her daughter (who was known as Baby M), as specified in her $10,000 surrogacy contract with William Stern, the case touched off extended public, legal, and philosophical discussion of surrogate motherhood. One commentator observed that one of the most serious charges against surrogate motherhood contracts is that they exploit women. ⁸

8. In urging President Clinton to oppose the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), Lane Kirkland, then president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said that NAFTA was based solely on the exploitation of Mexican workers. ⁹

9. It is frequently said that psychotherapists who have sexual relations with their patients are engaged in exploitation.

10. It is sometimes claimed that the volunteer army exploits those citizens who lack decent civilian career opportunities: A society as unjust as ours must draft its military to avoid unfair exploitation. . . . ¹⁰

11. A colleague, who was raised in West Virginia and remains intensely loyal to the place of his roots, bemoaned the fact that some West Virginians would cruise the highways during snowstorms and exploit stranded motorists by offering to assist them for a high fee. ¹¹

Although we frequently claim that some act, practice, or transaction is exploitative, the concept of exploitation is typically invoked without much analysis or argument. I do not mean that such claims are generally false, although I believe that some such claims are false. I do mean that the concept of exploitation is often utilized in such claims as if its meaning and moral force were self-evident. They are not. If some or even all of the sorts of claims I have noted are true, when and why are they true? And if they are true, what follows? Those are the questions that motivate this project. More precisely, the purpose of this book is to answer two sets of questions: (1) what are the truth conditions of an exploitation claim, and (2) what is the moral weight and moral force of an exploitation claim? Let me explain.

For present purposes, an exploitation claim refers to statements that A’s interaction with B or some more general phenomenon is (or is not) wrongfully exploitative or to statements that presuppose an account of wrongful exploitation. I say wrongfully exploitative because exploitation can be employed in a nonmoral sense as well.¹² To say that colleges exploit student athletes is to make an exploitation claim, as it is to assert that the Burroughs-Welcome Company was exploiting AIDS patients, or to assert that strip clubs do not exploit women. Susan Moller Okin makes an exploitation claim when she says that our family system constitutes the pivot of a societal system of gender that renders women vulnerable to dependency, exploitation, and abuse, for we must know what exploitation involves to determine whether this claim is valid.¹³ Elizabeth Anderson makes an exploitation claim when she says that the exploitation of surrogate mothers could not be avoided by properly screening surrogates [and] setting low fixed fees, for we must know what constitutes exploitation to assess the argument that certain reforms would not remove it.¹⁴

Assuming that exploitation claims are meant to have some definable content, that they are not merely a rhetorical placeholder for expressing disapproval, the first task of a theory of exploitation is to provide criteria for a valid exploitation claim. On the view that I shall defend, exploitation is a moralized concept. At least one criterion for a valid exploitation claim will turn out to be a moral criterion: a transaction is exploitative only if it is unfair. Because a valid exploitation claim presupposes that the transaction is—at least in that way—already wrongful, it might be thought that all the moral work is done once it is established that someone is wrongfully exploiting another.¹⁵ That thought would be in error.

The general point is this. Although the sort of exploitation in which we are interested is, by definition, wrong because unfair, the (moral) fact of exploitation settles less than meets the eye. To see this, I shall distinguish between the moral weight of exploitation, that is, its degree of wrongness, and the moral force of exploitation, that is, the various moral upshots that exploitation might involve for parties to the transaction or for society: Can people have a right to exploit? Is it wrong to allow oneself to be exploited? Should society prohibit actions if they are exploitative? Should we refuse to enforce exploitative agreements? And the wrongness of exploitation does not dictate the way in which these moral questions should be answered. Because the moral weight and moral force of exploitation are related, I shall have to address both issues. Still, I shall be especially concerned with considering the moral force of exploitation.

These are the questions I want to answer. Unfortunately, contemporary work in political and moral philosophy provides less help than one might suppose. Despite the frequency and ease with which we make exploitation claims in ordinary moral and political discourse, I think it fair to say that with the major (and I do mean major) exception of the Marxist tradition, exploitation has not been a central concern for contemporary political and moral philosophy.¹⁶ John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has virtually nothing to say about exploitation, as such.¹⁷ Robert Nozick discusses the Marxian account of exploitation in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but, not surprisingly, only to reject it as a basis for interfering with (most) transactions.¹⁸ Although Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice attempts to advance a democratic socialist vision of justice, its index contains no reference to exploitation.¹⁹ Nor does exploitation appear in the indexes to Brian Barry’s Theories of Justice²⁰ and Justice as Impartiality,²¹ Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family,²² and Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom²³, to mention several other prominent works (and I assure the reader that this is not a particularly biased sample). Bruce Ackerman’s Social Justice in the Liberal State contains a chapter entitled Exploitation, but the text provides no account of what exploitation is.²⁴ Although the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy’s annual NOMOS volumes (which now number thirty-eight) have covered many of the important concepts in political philosophy, there is no volume on exploitation.²⁵

I do not want to overstate the point. There is both a non-Marxist and a Marxist literature on exploitation, and much of it will prove helpful to our project.²⁶ Moreover, works that analyze practices that are said to be exploitative can do much to illuminate our topic, even when they do not engage in extensive analysis of exploitation itself. In the remaining parts of this introductory chapter, I do the following. I try to locate the territory of exploitation within our moral and political discourse. I briefly survey the definitional landscape that has been marked out and the conceptual quarrels that appear there. I indicate the kind of analysis that I hope to produce and the route that I intend to take. I sketch a very rough and preliminary account of the elements of exploitation. Finally, I make some brief remarks about the moral force of exploitation.

THE LOCUS OF EXPLOITATION

As a conjecture about the sociology of knowledge, I believe that the relative lack of attention to exploitation may be tied to several features about the location of exploitation in our moral and political discourse. First, precisely because the concept of exploitation has figured so prominently in Marxist political theory, non-Marxists may have been reluctant to enter the field, lest they be thought guilty by association with a theory that they want to reject.

Second, and more important, I believe that most political philosophers prefer to address questions of ideal political theory, to define the characteristics of a good society such as justice, equality, liberty, and community. By contrast, exploitation is a wrong. There may be less exploitation in a just society than in an unjust society, but we do not characterize justice as the (mere) avoidance of exploitation.

Third, exploitation is often a micro-level wrong to discrete individuals in distinct relationships and transactions. By contrast, much of the best contemporary political philosophy tends to focus on macro-level questions, such as the just distribution of resources and basic liberties and rights. Indeed, one standard picture of a just liberal democratic society maintains that a just society would provide a set of background institutions and resources within which individuals could act without regard to strong principles of justice for individual transactions, such as prices, wages, agreements—in other words, the stuff of the examples with which we began. As Thomas Nagel puts this view, It clearly is a desirable feature of a social order that within it, people should not be too constrained in the pursuit of their own lives by constant demands for impartial attention to the welfare of others. . . .²⁷ This view does not, of course, maintain that we are entitled to act unjustly towards others. But it does suggest that we need not worry much about individual transactions or relations if the background institutions provide all persons with a just package of primary goods, opportunities, and resources.

Now it is entirely plausible that the best division of philosophical labor would allocate more attention to the best principles for a good society rather than to forms of wrongness and that it would also devote more attention to macro-level questions than to micro-level ones. Still, as Judith Shklar has written, political philosophy should also attend to forms of wrongdoing as independent phenomena in their own right: Common sense and history surely tell us that these are primary experiences and have an immediate claim on our attention.²⁸ And the fact is that while the background conditions shape our existence, the primary experiences occur at the micro level. Exploitation matters to people. People who can accept an unjust set of aggregate resources with considerable equanimity will recoil when they feel exploited in an individual or local transaction.²⁹

It may be objected that while exploitation may manifest itself in micro-level transactions, it has its roots in macro-level injustice, that there would be much less micro-level exploitation in a society that is just at the macro level. Even if this were true, as it probably is, it is important to look closely at the micro level itself. If we are concerned about macro-level injustice in part because it gives rise to micro-level exploitation, we need to know what constitutes the micro-level exploitation so that we can determine what must be done at the macro level. Furthermore, micro-level exploitation is not as closely linked to macro-level injustice as might be thought. Even in a reasonably just society, people will find themselves in situations in which they can strike an agreement that will produce mutual gain, and some of those cases will give rise to allegations of exploitation.³⁰ Moreover, even when micro-level exploitation is rooted in background conditions that are clearly unjust by the principles of ideal theory, it may be thought that the best principle of nonideal morality is to respect the wishes of the parties when an agreement is mutually advantageous, exploitative though it may be. For all these reasons, then, the truth conditions and moral force of exploitation demand our attention.³¹

THE DEFINITIONAL LANDSCAPE

We can give a broad—lowest common denominator—definition of exploitation with which virtually everyone will agree.³² At the most general level, A exploits B when A takes unfair advantage of B. (I shall always refer to the alleged exploiter as A and to the alleged exploitee as B). One problem with such a broad account, as Arneson notes, is that there will be as many competing conceptions of exploitation as theories of what persons owe to each other by way of fair treatment.³³ The aim of this book is to do better. We can gain a somewhat sharper view of the issues that we must confront if we consider a sampling of the accounts that appear in the literature.

1. "[T]o exploit a person involves the harmful, merely instrumental utilization of him or his capacities, for one’s own advantage or for the sake of one’s own ends." ³⁴

2. "It is the fact that the [capitalist’s] income is derived through forced, unpaid, surplus [wage] labor, the product of which the workers do not control, which makes [wage labor] exploitive." ³⁵

3. Exploitation necessarily involves benefits or gains of some kind to someone. . . . Exploitation resembles a zero-sum game, viz. what the exploiter gains, the exploitee loses; or, minimally, for the exploiter to gain, the exploitee must lose. ³⁶

4. Exploitation [in exchange] demands . . . that there is no reasonably eligible alternative [for the exploitee] and that the consideration or advantage received is incommensurate with the price paid. One is not exploited if one is offered what one desperately needs at a fair and reasonable price. ³⁷

5. "Exploitation of persons consists in . . . wrongful behavior [that violates] the moral norm of protecting the vulnerable." ³⁸

6. "There are four conditions, all of which must be present if dependencies are to be exploitable. First, the relationship must be asymmetrical. . . . Second, . . . the subordinate party must need the resource that the superordinate supplies. . . . Third, . . . the subordinate party must depend upon some particular superordinate for the supply of needed resources. . . . Fourth, the superordinate . . . enjoys discretionary control over the resources that the subordinate needs from him. . . ." ³⁹

7. Common to all exploitation of one person (B) by another (A) ... is that A makes a profit or gain by turning some characteristic of B to his own advantage . . . exploitation . . . can occur in morally unsavory forms without harming the exploitee’s interests and . . . despite the exploitee’s fully voluntary consent to the exploitative behavior. . . . ⁴⁰

8. Persons are exploited if (1) others secure a benefit by (2) using them as a tool or resource so as (3) to cause them serious harm. ⁴¹

9. A society is exploitative when its social structure is organized so that unpaid labor is systematically forced out of one class and put at the disposal of another. . . . On the force-inclusive definition of exploitation, any exploitative society is a form of slavery. ⁴²

10. [A] group is exploited if it has some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off. ⁴³

11. [Exploitation is seen as the failure to pay labour its marginal product. . . . ⁴⁴

12. An exploitative exchange is ... an exchange in which the exploited party gets less than the exploiting party, who does better at the exploited party’s expense. . . . [T]he exchange must result from social relations of unequal power . . . exploitation can be entered into voluntarily; and can even, in some sense, be advantageous to the exploited party. ⁴⁵

13. [Capitalist] social relations . . . are exploitative, not only in the specific sense of extracting surplus labour, but in the more general sense of using someone as a means, utilizing her to her detriment as a way of promoting one’s own good. . . . ⁴⁶

14. Workers are exploited if they work longer hours than the number of labor hours employed in the goods they consume. ⁴⁷

15. [Exploitation forms part of an exchange of goods and services when 1) the goods and services exchanged are quite obviously not of equivalent value, and 2) one party to the exchange uses a substantial degree of coercion. ⁴⁸

16. [Exploitation is a psychological, rather than a social or an economic, concept. For an offer to be exploitative, it must serve to create or to take advantage of some recognized psychological vulnerability which, in turn, disturbs the offeree’s ability to reason effectively. ⁴⁹

Now all these accounts are compatible with the view that A wrongfully exploits B when A takes unfair advantage of B. But there are some important differences among them. Some accounts (10,14) are technical definitions of exploitation that are specific to a Marxist approach. Although none of the accounts denies that exploitation requires a gain to the exploiter, only some (3, 8) specifically mention that criterion. Some accounts invoke the Kantian notion that one wrongfully exploits when one treats another instrumentally, or merely as a means (1, 8,13). On some accounts, the exploited party must be harmed (1, 2, 3, 8, 9,), whereas other accounts allow that the exploited party may gain from the relationship (4, 7, 11, 12, 15). On some accounts, the exploited party must be coerced (2, 4, 6, 9,15), whereas others require at least a defect in the quality of the consent (12,16), and another maintains that exploitation can be fully voluntary (7), in which case the author also maintains that the exploited party has no grievance.⁵⁰

DEFINITION OR THEORY?

Given these sorts of disagreements, how should we proceed? Because we have no basis—at this point—for assessing the issues on which there appears to be controversy, I believe that we should adopt a strategy that meets two criteria: (1) it should be theoretically suggestive; and (2) it should avoid begging crucial questions.

To say that an account of exploitation should be theoretically suggestive is to say that it should highlight the key elements of exploitative relations and push us to analyze them in greater detail. We want an account of exploitation that cuts some theoretical ice. Robert Goodin has argued that to exploit people is to wrong them, however much or little they may lose or you may gain from the act.⁵¹ This sort of account offers too little. Our task is to distinguish the wrong-making characteristics of exploitation from other forms of wrong. And it may turn out that at least some forms of exploitation do depend on the relative gains to A and B.

But we do not want to begin with an account of exploitation that begs crucial questions. As we have seen, some writers have argued that exploitation must always be harmful to the exploitee or that a transaction cannot be exploitative unless the exploitee is coerced, is defrauded, or cannot reason effectively. I see no reason to put such constraints on what counts as exploitation, at least at the outset. While some exploitative transactions are harmful to the exploitee, we have seen that we also appeal to the notion of exploitation in cases in which the exploitee seems to gain from the transaction, and I do not think we should rule such cases out of bounds. I would go further. I believe that exploitation would be of much less theoretical interest on a no harm, no exploitation rule. We do not need to be moral rocket scientists to know that it is wrong for A to gain from an action that unjustifiably harms or coerces B. Even a libertarian will grant that some harmful exploitation may be legitimately prohibited by the state, if only because it is harmful (or rights-violating) rather than because it is exploitative. By contrast, it is more difficult to explain when and why it might be wrong for A to gain from an action that benefits B and to which B voluntarily consents. And it is certainly more difficult to explain why society might be justified in prohibiting such transactions or refusing to enforce some such agreements.

For these reasons, I shall distinguish between harmful exploitation and mutually advantageous exploitation. In speaking of mutually advantageous exploitation, I do not imply that both parties are exploited. There may or may not be such cases, but, if so, they are not the ones I have in mind. Rather, in speaking of mutually advantageous exploitation I simply mean that the exploitee gains from the transaction as well as the exploiter. It is the advantageousness of the transaction that is mutual, not the exploitation. To use somewhat different terminology, I say that exploitation is mutually advantageous only when the transaction is Pareto superior, as, for example, in the case of the greedy snowstorm rescuer, described at the beginning of this chapter.⁵² Similarly, I shall distinguish between nonconsensual exploitation, where the exploited party does not give voluntary (or valid) consent, say, because of coercion or fraud, and consensual exploitation, where it appears that the exploited party has given voluntary and appropriately informed consent to the transaction.

Do I beg the question by assuming that exploitation can be mutually advantageous and consensual? I think not. Although I think it plain that—as a fact about ordinary language—we sometimes use the word exploitation for cases that are mutually advantageous and consensual, suppose that we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that the word exploitation would be best limited to cases in which the exploitee is harmed. Nothing would have changed. We would still have to understand whether there are important distinctions between those cases that are (ex hypothesi) wrongly referred to as mutually advantageous exploitation and those mutually advantageous transactions that are not described in that way. It would remain an open question as to whether some mutually advantageous arrangements are wrongful and why they are wrongful. And it would remain an open question as to whether such transactions could be justifiably prohibited.

To press this point a bit further, suppose we classify transactions as harmful to B or advantageous to B and as fair to B or unfair to B. Then we have four possibilities, as depicted in Figure 1.1.

I shall ignore cases in cells A and B (assuming that there are transactions, as contrasted with impositions, that are both harmful and fair). This book is primarily although not exclusively an examination of the cases in cell C—the the mutually advantageous and unfair ones. If someone wants to claim that, by definition, cases in cell C are not exploitative, I think that use of language is rather odd, but so be it. These are the cases in which I am interested, and we have to decide what we want to say about them. We will not solve important theoretical problems by definitional stipulations, for very little, if anything, of moral significance turns on the words or labels that we invoke. Now, if someone wants to claim that a mutually advantageous and consensual transaction cannot be unfair, then that is not a dispute over language. That is a substantive claim to the effect that cell C is empty, and not a linguistic claim that what is in cell C is not properly described as exploitative. I see no reason to think that position is correct.

Figure 1.1

I said that I shall focus on mutually advantageous exploitation as contrasted with harmful exploitation because it poses more interesting theoretical issues. It also avoids what I shall call the problem of occlusion. Consider criminal wrongdoing. When a person is thought to have committed a criminal wrong, such as attempted homicide, the prosecution will often charge the defendant with the most serious applicable crime, but the charge may also involve lesser included offenses, such as assault and battery.⁵³ Yet when we think and talk about such cases, the lesser included offenses are apt to drop out of sight. The more serious offenses occlude the lesser offenses. Similarly, when we offer a moral description of an act, we typically invoke the strongest applicable moral description. And the strongest applicable moral description of some exploitative acts may not refer to their exploitativeness. Arneson notes, for example, that murdering someone would not be characterized as exploitation even though the murderer profits from the act and thus unfairly uses the victim.⁵⁴ And Robert Goodin observes that if a transfer were effected through sheer brute force, we would ordinarily not describe it (not primarily, anyway) as an act of exploitation. . . . The thief who simply seizes his victims’ property does not just exploit them—he robs them.⁵⁵

Although we are unlikely to use the word exploitation to describe a profitable murder or a typical mugging, it is not because it would be inaccurate to do so. Rather, the stronger moral description overlays and occludes our vision of the lesser included wrong of exploitation. When exploitation is harmful or coercive, it is often the harm or coercion that captures our attention, not the exploitation—whatever that turns out to be. Thus while some argue that where there is no harm and coercion (or fraud), there can be no exploitation, I think we will make more theoretical progress if we focus on those cases in which exploitation is at least arguably mutually advantageous or consensual, where the alleged exploitation is not occluded by harm or coercion. If, in the final analysis, there is no exploitation when an arrangement is mutually advantageous or consensual, if there’s no there, there, then we also will have learned something important.

THE ELEMENTS OF EXPLOITATION

I want to travel light, without more assumptions about exploitation than we need to carry, but we will need some signposts for our journey. Let us start with the claim that A exploits B when A takes unfair advantage of B. Taking unfair advantage could be understood in two ways. First, it may refer to some dimension of the outcome of the exploitative act or relation, and this, it seems, has two elements: (1) the benefit to A, and (2) the effect on B. We may say that the benefit to A is unfair because it is wrong for A to benefit at all from his or her act (e.g., by harming B) or because A’s benefit is excessive relative to the benefit to B. Second, to say that A takes unfair advantage of B may imply that A has been able to turn some characteristic of B or some feature of B’s situation to his or her advantage.⁵⁶ We imply that there is some sort of defect in the process by which the unfair outcome has come about or the formation of the agreement between A and B, for example, that A has coerced or defrauded or manipulated B. In the final analysis we may find that these three elements are not all necessary to account for exploitation, but they provide us with a way to begin. Let us consider them in a bit more detail.

The Benefit to A

Bracketing for the moment what counts as an advantage to A, and also bracketing cases in which A attempts but fails to gain an advantage from a transaction with B, it seems that A cannot take unfair advantage of B unless A gets some advantage from B.⁵⁷ We can see the relevance of the benefit to A by contrasting exploitation with other forms of wrongdoing, such as abuse, discrimination, and oppression. Let us say that A discriminates against B when A wrongly deprives B of some opportunity or benefit because of some characteristic of B that should not have been relevant to A’s action. There was a period in American history in which many women became public school teachers because they were denied the opportunity to enter other professions, such as law and medicine. To the extent that the society benefited (in one way) from the pool of highly qualified public school teachers, the discrimination may have been exploitative, even if unintentionally so.⁵⁸ On the other hand, if A refuses to sell a house to B solely because of B’s race, then it would be odd to say that A exploits B. This sort of discrimination looks like a negative-sum game in which B loses and no one gains.

As with discrimination, so with abuse. It has been alleged, for example, that medical students are frequently abused by oral insults and denigration and that this abuse may leave long-lasting emotional scars.⁵⁹ By contrast, it is also sometimes claimed that medical interns are exploited, that they work long hours for low pay. The contrast is just right. There is no reason to think that anyone gains—at least in any normal sense—from abuse, but it is at least plausible to think that the hospitals or patients gain from the exploitation of interns.⁶⁰ Similarly, a severely handicapped person who means well but cannot accomplish much could be abused, forced to perform drudgery . . . without being technically exploited. ⁶¹

Let us say that A oppresses B when A deprives B of freedoms or opportunities to which B is entitled.⁶² If A gains from the oppressive relationship, as when A enslaves B, then A may both oppress and exploit B. But there is no reason to think that A always gains from oppression, and when A does not gain, there is no reason to regard the oppression as exploitative. Parents can be oppressive without being exploitative. Or consider the plight of the unemployed. We might want to say that the unemployed are oppressed, but unless we could specify the ways in which some gain from the fact that the unemployed are unemployed, it would be odd to say that the unemployed are being exploited. Of course Marxists would claim that capitalists can pay exploitative wages to the employed precisely because there is a reserve army of the unemployed with whom the employed must compete. Thus the unemployed may be exploited and not merely oppressed. But that merely confirms that exploitation involves a benefit, in this case, a gain to the capitalist class.

The Effect on B

As our definitional survey indicated, some commentators maintain that exploitation resembles a zero-sum game, that the exploiter gains what the exploitee loses.⁶³ Others maintain that exploitation is always harmful to the exploitee. The first claim is demonstrably false, for there can be harmful exploitation that is not zero-sum (or is zero-sum only in the loose sense that the exploitee loses while the exploiter gains). Harmful exploitation can occur in a negative-sum game when A’s gain is less than B’s loss, as in Figure 1.2. Harmful exploitation can also occur in a positive-sum game when A gains by imposing a loss on B that is less than A’s gain, as in Figure 1.3. But whether harmful exploitation is zero-sum, negative-sum, or positive-sum is not important in the present context, for it is relatively uncontroversial that exploitation can be harmful to B, as it is in both of the previous cases.

Figure 1.2 Harmful Exploitation as Negative-Sum Game

Figure 1.3 Harmful Exploitation as Positive-Sum Game

There is, however, a further question as to whether A can exploit B if B is not directly affected by A’s utilization of B (as in Figure 1.4) or if B gains from the transaction (as in Figure 1.5). Feinberg refers to some cases that fit the payoff structure depicted in Figure 1.4 as cases of harmless parasitism, as when A follows B’s taillights in a dense fog. A uses B to A’s own advantage, but does not render B worse off (assume that B is not bothered by A’s headlights in B’s mirror), for A’s act does not affect B at all.⁶⁴ In other cases of nonharmful exploitation, the transaction appears to benefit both A and B, as when A rescues a stranded motorist for a fee.

Now, in asking how A’s action affects B’s interests, we must be careful to adopt an all-things-considered point of view. There are, after all, negative elements in virtually all uncontroversially beneficial transactions. Paying money for a good that is clearly worth the price is still a negative element in the transaction. It would be better to get it for free. If A and B enter into a cooperative agreement where A gives B $100 for a book that is worth a lot to A (because it completes a collection) but is worth little to B, we do not say that B has been harmed by the transaction just because B has lost the book any more than we say that A has been harmed because the transaction required A to pay $100. Here is a case in which the heterogeneity of preferences—the fact that A and B value the book and the money differently—work to the advantage of both parties. Similarly, we do not say that a worker is harmed by employment merely because the worker prefers leisure to work. If the benefits to B from employment are greater than the costs to B from being employed, then employment is beneficial to B, all things considered. Thus in deciding whether a case of alleged exploitation should be classified as harmful exploitation or mutually advantageous exploitation, we must look at its net effect on B.

Figure 1.4 Harmless Parasitism

Figure 1.5 Mutually Advantageous Exploitation

With this in mind, let us consider mutually advantageous exploitation in a bit more detail. It should be obvious that I am not arguing that any distribution that looks like Figure 1.5 is a case of mutually advantageous exploitation. To characterize a payoff structure as exploitative requires us to say that the payoffs are unfair, and nothing in this payoff matrix entitles us to make such an assumption. I am simply arguing that some cases of alleged exploitation—those that are mutually advantageous—have this sort of payoff structure.

We can characterize this case in somewhat different language. All cases of mutually advantageous exploitation are ones in which a transaction between A and B generates a social surplus as contrasted with the no-transaction baseline. In any potential transaction, each party has a reservation price, that is, the value that the person must receive if he or she is to agree to the transaction. Suppose that A is a home buyer and that B is a home seller. Suppose that A is prepared to pay no more than $175,000 for B’s house and that B is not prepared to sell to A for less than $150,000.⁶⁵ A’s reservation price is $175,000 and B’s reservation price is $150,000. In principle, A and B are willing to make an agreement at any price between $150,000 and $175,000. The space between the parties’ reservation prices constitutes their zone of agreement, or bargaining range (see Figure 1.6). Any outcome within their zone of agreement generates a social surplus, which could be defined as the difference between the buyer’s and seller’s reservation prices.⁶⁶ If A and B agree on a price of $160,000, the social surplus is $25,000: A receives the house for $15,000 less than A was willing to pay ($175,000) and B receives $10,000 more than B was willing to accept ($150,000).

Figure 1.6 Zone of Agreement

Joel Feinberg argues that if a transaction is mutually advantageous, then it is wrong to say that one party gains at the other party’s expense.⁶⁷ If A gains at B’s expense only when A harms B, then Feinberg is right by definition. But there is an important sense in which any marginal gain to one party within the zone of agreement is indeed at the other party’s expense: while the parties may prefer any outcome within the zone of agreement to the nonagreement solution, they are not indifferent to the distribution of the social surplus within the zone of agreement.⁶⁸ Each would prefer a price that is furthest from his or her reservation price. And any movement away from one’s own reservation price is, in that sense, at the other party’s expense, although it is not harmful to the other party as contrasted with the no-transaction baseline.

What I have called mutually advantageous exploitation occurs when B gains relative to the noncooperation baseline but the distribution of the social surplus is unfair to B. Consider a garden-variety case of alleged exploitation. An unexpected blizzard hits an area and people rush to the hardware store to buy a shovel. The hardware store owner sees the opportunity to make an abnormal profit and raises the price of a shovel from $15 to $30. If B agrees to pay $30 for the shovel, because the shovel is worth more than $30 to B under the circumstances, then the transaction is clearly Pareto superior. Both parties gain. But B feels exploited because B gains less (or pays more) than B thinks reasonable.⁶⁹ A similar structure applies to some of the other cases of alleged exploitation with which we began—profits from the AIDS drug AZT, surrogate motherhood contracts, organ sales. We need not deny that B benefits from these transactions, all things considered. Rather, we say that A exploits B because we believe that B pays too a high price for what he or she gains.

I have suggested that a mutually advantageous transaction is (wrongly) exploitative only if the outcome is (in some way) unfair to B. This is not merely definitional. After all, it may be thought that a mutually advantageous transaction is exploitative if A takes advantage of B’s vulnerabilities or desperate situation to strike a deal that is, nonetheless, advantageous to B—given B’s desperate situation. But that is false. For if A makes a reasonable proposal that B has no alternative but to accept (A charges B $15 for the shovel) given B’s desperate situation, it would be wrong to claim that A exploits B. And we cannot say that A exploits B when A gets a better deal in negotiation than [B] would have obtained for the same good . . . had [B] lacked the difficulty, because it is often the case that there would be no transaction between A and B were it not for B’s difficulty.⁷⁰ There is, of course, a normal price for snow shovels that are purchased under nonemergency conditions. But there is no normal price for AZT for people who do not desperately need AZT. And there is no normal price for rescuing stranded motorists who are not in difficulty, because to be a stranded motorist is to be in difficulty.

It might be said that what I have called mutually advantageous exploitation can and should be understood as a form of harmful exploitation. If we evaluate a transaction by reference to a fairness baseline as contrasted with a no-transaction baseline, then we can say that B is harmed by paying $30 for a shovel by comparison with the fairness baseline (say, where B pays $15 for a shovel) even if B gains by comparison with the no-transaction baseline or B’s reservation price.⁷¹ But, once again, such relabeling would not change anything. Although it might permit us to say that all exploitation is harmful to the exploitee, we would still have to distinguish between those cases in which B is harmed relative to both the fairness baseline and the no-transaction baseline and those cases where B is harmed only by reference to the fairness baseline but not by reference to the no-transaction baseline. The distinction I have drawn would simply reappear in other terms.

Still, it may be argued that the proposed distinction between harmful exploitation and mutually advantageous exploitation ignores a deeper—Kantian—way in which what I have called mutually advantageous exploitation is actually harmful to B, namely, that A treats B merely as a means to be utilized to his own advantage rather than as an end in herself. And so treating a person is to harm her. Along these lines, Allen Buchanan argues that exploitation occurs whenever persons are harmfully utilized as mere instruments for private gain, and adds that this could apply to business transactions between two affluent bankers.⁷² Although both bankers have property in the means of production and there are no class differences between them, [e]ach harmfully utilizes the other as a mere means to his own advantage. Each views the needs and desires of the other not as needs and desires, but rather as levers to be manipulated, as weaknesses to be preyed upon.⁷³

It is not clear what to make of this view. First, and on at least one plausible reading of the

Reviews for Exploitation

[vegetarian_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My first thought would be that this author has moved beyond analyzing these issues as a Marxist and is doing something different with the same topic without undermining the deep and profound commitment to social justice and organizational and economic equity and fairness broadly understood.