ABSTRACT
Exploitation is a distinctive kind of unfair advantage-taking unique to market exchanges. Disagreement among exploitation theorists pertains not to the defensibility of this generalized account, but to the nature of the advantage-taking in question and its normative implications. Theoretical accounts of exploitation tend to align with either the liberal or the Marxist tradition. Exploitation theorists who take a broadly liberal approach seek to determine the presence or absence of exploitation by asking whether particular market transactions between discrete parties have been marred by impaired consent or unfair distributive outcomes. This transactional approach has its roots in a broadly Lockean account of fair market price and a distinctly Kantian account of autonomous agency. Exploitation theorists of the structural tradition see exploitation as resulting from, and occurring within, socio-economic systems of hierarchy, domination, and oppression. Structuralists take the Marxist account of class exploitation as their point of departure yet reject the labor theory of value on which it originally depended.
