ABSTRACT
Exploitation is a form of injustice. Justice – the standard by which we determine who has a moral right to do or have what – is present in our moral thinking only because we often disagree as to what would be the best thing to do in given circumstances. If you and I and everyone else all agreed on the most appropriate destination for my latest salary increment – whether it be a particular charity or the Inland Revenue or my bank account – any talk about who has what moral rights with respect to that increment would be utterly superfluous. Because we entertain mutually differing tastes, preferences and, more generally, conceptions of ‘the good life’, and because one person’s enactment of them can frustrate the corresponding enactments of others, morality incorporates standards for determining the permissible bounds of each person’s such enactments.2 An inherent feature of any theory of justice, then, is that it advances criteria for what are to count as wrongful – that is, unjust – gains and losses. However, the injustice of some types of gain and loss is more readily apparent than that of others. Exploitations, unlike robberies, are occurrences in which the wrongful gains and losses respectively incurred by the parties involved are not the directly implied effects of those occurrences. Robberies are, transparently, violations of ownership rights: those who perform them are ipso facto breaching duties correlatively entailed by those rights. But exploitations are not like this: exploitees do not have ownership rights to that which their exploiters gain or withhold in exploiting them. Accordingly, the identity criteria for exploitative gains and losses – as a subset of wrongful gains and losses – are somewhat more complex than their counterparts for robbery. Let us begin with an assumption which I shall not here defend: that any complete theory of distributive justice must include a model of exploitation. In that regard, a striking feature of most current liberal accounts of distributive justice advanced within analytical political philosophy is their conspicuous lack of such a model. Instead, the most that we tend to find are various ad-hoc intuitively compelling examples of unjust exchanges, whose sole explanatory feature is too often unilluminatingly described as their having been due to one party’s taking ‘unfair advantage’ of, or exercising superior bargaining power over, the other. Indeed, in some circles, it has long been a widely held orthodoxy that liberalism – especially, though not only, in its classical or libertarian form – is simply
incapable of sustaining a model of exploitation that would apply to a voluntary exchange. Since such liberalism tends to see actors’ voluntariness as legitimating the outcomes they incur, it is incapable of accounting for the injustice of exploitation. And insofar as such liberalism eschews any particular conception of the good life – that is, dissociates itself from any conception of objective value or objective human needs, and professes indifference as between diverse tastes and preferences which it simply takes as given – and insofar as it remains dismissive of irreducibly holist or functionalist explanations of social interaction, it commits itself only to a stark conceptual budget of individual rights and choices: to the primacy of personal claims and liberties, and to personal choice as the basic explanatory datum of social phenomena.3 Such an impoverished intellectual commitment, it is said, renders liberalism conceptually incapable of even identifying – much less condemning and abolishing – many significant forms of exploitation that occur under conditions of voluntary exchange. Indeed, many libertarians themselves maintain that one of the virtues of voluntary exchange is, precisely, the impossibility of its being exploitative, of its generating what Marx called surplus value for either of the exchangers. A principal aim of this essay is to refute that impossibility claim and, in so doing, to challenge that orthodoxy. Exploitations are a type of transaction. By a transaction I mean any kind of event involving at least two persons – Red and Blue – in which goods or services are transferred from at least one of them to the other. On this understanding, then, giving a gift is a transaction but it is obviously not an exploitation. Robbery is also a transaction but it, too, is not an exploitation. The sufficient reason why neither of these counts as an exploitation is that the transfers respectively involved in each of them are unilateral ones: the goods or services transferred are all travelling in only one direction, from Red to Blue. Moreover, in the first case, the case of gifting, we can assume that both Red and Blue are voluntary participants in the transaction. In the second case, the case of robbery, only Blue is a voluntary participant. To be an exploitation, a transaction must be some sort of exchange: there must be goods or services travelling in both directions – from Red to Blue, but also from Blue to Red. Exploitations are thus bilateral in nature. But this bilateral requirement, though necessary, is insufficient, because there are several relevantly different kinds of bilateral transaction, and not all of them would count as exploitations. Consider a charity to which people donate some labour – some working hours – towards helping with its activities. In return, those donors each receive a nondescript ballpoint pen as a token recognition of their contribution. So contributing to this charity does indeed involve an exchange: Red donates a week’s labour to Blue, and Blue supplies Red with the ballpoint pen. Is Red thereby exploited? No. For if that exchange is to serve its jointly intended charitable purpose, it is vital that the pen be worth less than the labour. Presumably, neither Red nor Blue wants the pen to be worth as much as – let alone more than – the labour. Both Red and Blue are voluntary participants in this transaction and both accept
that there should be that positive difference in value between what Blue gets and what Red gets: that is, it would be contrary to the point of this transaction for Red to receive, say, a hundred ballpoint pens from the charity’s organisers. An exchange of this sort is often called a benefit. Benefits are not exploitations. But benefits are, of course, only one kind of exchange. One of their distinguishing features is that at least one of the transactors (in this case Red) is altruistically – or, as Wicksteed would have put it, tuistically – motivated.4 In that respect, her motivation is of the same type as a gift-giving Red who simply donates the labour to Blue without receiving anything in return.5
