ABSTRACT
Ethics and economics are intimately connected but not as a one-sided connection of cause and effect. Economic exploitation is an exploitation of the ethical will, of the ethical disposition that productive activity presupposes. In economic exploitation not only are the worker's energies, time, and skills alienated but his pacific and generous disposition, his trust, are exploited. Exploitation of the ethical capital occurs when coercion is applied to elicit fruits of good will without giving anything in return. In fact this is the general meaning of exploitation: getting something for nothing or imposing a system from which one regularly gets more than he puts into it. A history of the accumulation and exploitation of the ethical capital—its accumulation by society and its exploitation by the State—would be a new kind of history and would throw an entirely new light on political systems.
