What's wrong with exploitation?
Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (2):137–150 (2007)
| Abstract | This paper offers a new answer to an old question. Others have argued that exploitation is wrong because it is coercive, or degrading, or fails to protect the vulnerable. But these answers only work for certain cases; counterexamples are easily found. In this paper I identify a different answer to the question by placing exploitation within the larger family of wrongs to which it belongs. Exploitation is one species of wrongful gain, and exploiters always gain at the expense of others by inflicting relative losses on disadvantaged parties. They do harm to their victims, even when their interactions are mutually advantageous, by failing to benefit the disadvantaged party as fairness requires. This failure is the essential wrong in every case of wrongful exploitation. At the end of the paper I assess how wrong this failure is as a way to gain at another's expense. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesAllen W. Wood (1995). Exploitation. Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (2):136--158.
Jeremy Snyder (2010). Exploitation and Sweatshop Labor: Perspectives and Issues. Business Ethics Quarterly 20 (2):187-213.
Robert Mayer (2005). Guestworkers and Exploitation. Review of Politics 67 (2):311--334.
Ruth J. Sample (2003). Exploitation: What It Is and Why It's Wrong. Rowman & Littlefield.
Tea Logar (2010). Exploitation as Wrongful Use: Beyond Taking Advantage of Vulnerabilities. Acta Analytica 25 (3):329-346.
Jeremy Snyder (2010). Exploitations and Their Complications: The Necessity of Identifying the Multiple Forms of Exploitation in Pharmaceutical Trials. Bioethics 26 (5):251-258.
Robert Mayer (2003). Payday Loans and Exploitation. Public Affairs Quarterly 17 (3):197--217.
Paul McLaughlin (2008). The Ethics of Exploitation. Studia Philosophica Estonica 1:5-16.
Vittorio Bufacchi (2002). The Injustice of Exploitation. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (1):1-15.
Mikhail Valdman (2009). A Theory of Wrongful Exploitation. Philosophers' Imprint 9 (6):1-14.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads41 ( #27,938 of 549,224 )Recent downloads (6 months)4 ( #19,303 of 549,224 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
