Abstract
What conditions of vulnerability must an individual face in order that we might ever correctly say that she or he has been wrongfully exploited? Mikhail Valdman has recently argued that wrongful exploitation is the extraction of excessive benefits from someone who cannot reasonably refuse one’s offer. So, ‘being unable to reasonably refuse an offer’ is Valdman’s answer to this question. I will argue that this answer is too narrow, but that other competing answers, like Alan Wertheimer’s, are too broad. I propose a new answer, a “vulnerability clause” to partially comprise a theory of wrongful exploitation. In so doing, I appeal to Marilyn Frye’s account of oppression and take guidance from her inclusion and exclusion criteria.
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Notes
Goodin (1987) does the same as Wertheimer in this regard.
For instance, some might be tempted to say that the normative baseline for a fair agreement is at some half-way point between people’s reservation prices. The idea here is that people should benefit equally in a fair transaction. However, this cannot be right, since there are all sorts of clearly exploitative cases in which the exploited party actually benefits more than his or her exploiter. Consider the Antidote Case itself. Hiker A takes unfair advantage of Hiker B, even though Hiker B benefits more from the transaction than Hiker A, that is, A merely gets money, B gets his life.
Perhaps the normative baseline for a fair transaction is some function of the background conditions, or starting points of the agents in the trade? Wertheimer points out that this account is also implausible. An exploited person might be much wealthier and more privileged than the person who exploits him. Imagine a case in which a poor shop owner raises his price exorbitantly for snow shovels on the day of a storm on which customers’ cars are stuck in the snow bank on the shop owner’s block. The customers might be wealthy, and paying ten times the normal amount for a snow shovel might not hurt their budgets in any significant way. However, these customers are, nonetheless, exploited by the poor shop owner.
Goodin (1987, p. 175). See footnote 1.
Even if my reader does not find the prospect of extending the Cage vulnerability clause to the Antidote Case, she should at least be content with the following modification, which is also welcome to me, which is a disjunction of Valdman’s clause and my own: a necessary condition on being the victim of wrongful exploitation is: one has no reasonable alternative but to transact/agree/submit or all of the reasonable alternatives available are attached to unjust burdens or hassles. A simpler way of putting this is: all of the reasonable alternatives available to the victim are attached to unjust burdens or hassles, and so cage the exploitee.
References
Frye M (1983) The politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. The Crossing Press, Freedom
Goodin R (1987) Exploiting a situation and exploiting a person. In: Reeve A (ed) Modern theories of exploitation. Sage Publications, London
Liberto H (2013) Noxious markets vs. noxious gift relationships. Soc Theory Pract 39(2):265–287
Sample R (2003) Exploitation: what it is and why it’s wrong. Rowman & Littlefield, Landham
Valdman M (2009) A theory of wrongful exploitation. Philosophers Impr 9(6):1–14
Wertheimer A (1996) Exploitation. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Wood A (1995) Exploitation. Soc Philos Policy 12:136–158
Acknowledgments
I owe great thanks to the audiences at the 2013 British Society for Ethical Theory conference, the Group Session of the Society for Analytic Feminism at the 2012 Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, the philosophy department at Calvin College, and the Minorities and Philosophy group at Yale University. I owe special thanks to Daniel Hausman, Benjamin Sachs, and Michael Robillard.
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Liberto, H. Exploitation and the Vulnerability Clause. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 619–629 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9494-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9494-z