Structural exploitation

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 154-179

  Zwolinski, Matt ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO   (United States)

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EID: 84255172632     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S026505251100015X     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. "Wrongful exploitation" will appear to some to be a redundant phrase. I explain why it is not in footnote 5. "Sweatshop" will appear to some to be a term that conveys moral opprobrium but little in the way of semantic content. Though sympathetic with the complaint, I attempt to define the term more precisely in Section IV. For a sampling of scholarly criticism of sweatshops, see Denis G. Arnold, "Exploitation and the Sweatshop Quandary," Business Ethics Quarterly 13, no. 2 (2003
2. Denis G. Arnold and Norman E. Bowie, "Sweatshops and Respect for Persons," Business Ethics Quarterly 13, no. 2 (2003
3. Robert Mayer, "Sweatshops, Exploitation, and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 4 (2007
4. Iris Marion Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model," Social Philosophy and Policy 23, no. 1 (2006
5. C. D. Meyers, "Moral Duty, Individual Responsibility, and Sweatshop Exploitation," Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 4 (2007
6. Jeremy C. Snyder, "Needs Exploitation," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11, no. 4 (2008
7. "Exploitation and Sweatshop Labor: Perspectives and Issues," Business Ethics Quarterly 20, no. 2 (2010
8. For evidence that sweatshop wages tends to exceed-sometimes greatly-wages in non-sweatshop jobs, see Ian Maitland, "The Great Non-Debate Over International Sweatshops," in Tom L. Beauchamp and Norman E. Bowie, ed., Ethical Theory and Business (Engelwood Cliffes: Pretence Hall, 1996; reprint, 2001
9. Paul Krugman, "In Praise of Cheap Labor," Slate (March 21 1997
10. Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek, "Sweatshops and Third World Living Standards: Are the Jobs Worth the Sweat?" Journal of Labor Research 27, no. 2 (2006
11. I shall have more to say about this point in Section II of this essay, but it is one that is compatible with and explicitly accepted by almost all contemporary theories of exploitation. See, for instance, Allen W. Wood, "Exploitation," Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no. 2 (1995): 148-49;
12. Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14-16;
13. Ruth Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 4;
14. Snyder, "Needs Exploitation," 390;
15. Mikhail Valdman, "A Theory of Wrongful Exploitation," Philosophers' Imprint 9, no. 6 (2009): 1.
16. I have argued this point at somewhat greater length in Matt Zwolinski, "Sweatshops, Choice, and Exploitation," Business Ethics Quarterly 17, no. 4 (2007): 704-10.
17. I will address this question in this essay with reference to the specific issue of sweatshop labor, but it is worth noting that the question is perfectly general and relevant to a number of other issues of practical concern such as those illustrated in recent debates over organ sales and prostitution, and not-so-recent debates over the legitimacy of interest. See James Stacy Taylor, Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts are Morally Imperative (New York: Ashgate, 2005
18. Peter de Marneffe, Liberalism and Prostitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). On the legitimacy of interest, see the debate between the classical liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat and the socialist-anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, available online at http://praxeology.net/FB-PJP-DOI.htm.
19. I define "wrongful" exploitation in this way because there is a sense of the term "exploitation" that does not connote any wrongdoing on the part of the exploiter, as when a shrewd entrepreneur exploits an opportunity, or when a football coach exploits his opponent's weakness. There is some debate in the literature regarding whether these are two distinct concepts confused by virtue of sharing the same word, or whether it is not the concept of exploitation but its wrongfulness that varies in different contexts. The former view is defended in Wertheimer, Exploitation, 6.
20. The latter in Wood, "Exploitation," 137-41.
21. Wertheimer, Exploitation: 17-18.
22. The former approach is defended most notably in Wertheimer, Exploitation.
23. Also in Valdman, "A Theory of Wrongful Exploitation." The latter approach has been most influentially defended in Wood, "Exploitation" and Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong.
24. See, for a discussion, Wertheimer, Exploitation: chap. 4;
25. Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong, 154-59.
26. Wertheimer, Exploitation.
27. See, for a helpful overview of Marx's theory of exploitation and its challenges, Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 177-87.
28. See, for instance, G. A. Cohen, "The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation," Philosophy and Public Affairs 8, no. 4 (1979): chap. 4;
29. Richard Arneson, "What'sWrong with Exploitation?," Ethics 91, no. 2 (1981
30. John E. Roemer, "Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?" Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (1985
31. Jeffrey Reiman, "Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen," Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 1 (1987
32. John E. Roemer, "What is Exploitation? Reply to Jeffrey Reiman," Philosophy and Public Affairs 18, no. 1 (1989
33. Again, for a helpful overview see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction: 177-87.
34. See, for instance, Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong, chap. 4.
35. Snyder, "Exploitation and Sweatshop Labor: Perspectives and Issues," 191.
36. Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong, 97-98.
37. Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model," 120.
38. Onora O'Neill, "Between Consenting Adults," in Constructions of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 273-4.
39. Human Resources Division U.S. General Accounting Office, "Sweatshops in the U.S.: Opinions on Their Extent and Possible Enforcement Options," (Washington, D.C., 1988
40. A brief, helpful overview of the history of sweatshops and recent developments can be found in Denis Arnold and Laura Hartman, "Moral Imagination and the Future of Sweatshops," Business and Society Review 108, no. 4 (2003
41. Brian Aitken, Ann Harrison, and Robert Lipsey, "Wages and Foreign Ownership: A Comparative Study of Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States," Journal of International Economics 40 (1996
42. Powell and Skarbek, "Sweatshops and Third World Living Standards: Are the Jobs Worth the Sweat?" The "sweatshops" examined in this study were those that were identified as sweatshops by anti-sweatshop activists quoted in the popular press. See p. 267.
43. Arnold and Bowie, "Sweatshops and Respect for Persons," 234.
44. Arnold and Hartman, "Moral Imagination and the Future of Sweatshops," 453, n. 1;
45. Beyond Sweatshops: Positive Deviancy and Global Labour Practices," Business Ethics: A European Review 14, no. 3 (2005): 207;
46. Worker Rights and Low Wage Industrialization: How to Avoid Sweatshops," Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2006): 677, n. 1;
47. Denis Arnold, "Working Conditions: Safety and Sweatshops," in George Brenkert and Tom Beauchamp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Business Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 645.
48. Though, to be fair, the anecdotes regarding the likely alternatives to sweatshop labor for workers in the developing world are no less shocking. See, for instance, Nicholas' Kristof's account of children scavenging in the garbage dumps of Phnom Penh in Nicholas D. Kristof, "Where Sweatshops are a Dream," New York Times (January 14, 2009
49. See, for discussion, the essays in Pamela Varley, The Sweatshop Quandary: Corporate Responsibility on the Global Frontier (Washington, DC: Investor Responsibility Research Center, 1998
50. A discussion of some of the more shocking accounts can be found in Arnold and Bowie, "Sweatshops and Respect for Persons," 228-33.
51. The argument that follows is made at greater length by Benjamin Powell in Benjamin Powell, "In Reply to Sweatshop Sophistries," Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2006
52. Like all economic generalizations, this is a rule of thumb and not a necessary law. Denis Arnold and Laura Hartman have often stressed that the exercise of "moral imagination" by managers is capable of yielding solutions that improve working conditions without raising costs to employers, and document a number of cases where such improvements have been made.
53. Denis Arnold, Laura Hartman, and Richard E. Wokutch, Rising Above Sweatshops: Innovative Approaches to Global Labor Challenges (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2003
54. Arnold and Hartman, "Beyond Sweatshops: Positive Deviancy and Global Labour Practices.";
55. "Moral Imagination and the Future of Sweatshops."
56. Ben Powell and J. Clark, "Guatemala Sweatshops: Employee Evidence on Working Conditions," Department of Economics (Boston, MA: Suffolk University, 2010). The survey was conducted on employees of Nicotex and Sam Bridge, chosen because those firms were identified as sweatshops and protested by the National Labor Committee.
57. Arnold and Bowie, "Sweatshops and Respect for Persons," 227-28.
58. Arnold and Hartman, "Worker Rights and Low Wage Industrialization: How to Avoid Sweatshops," 686-90.
59. Arnold, "Working Conditions: Safety and Sweatshops," 638.
60. Arnold and Hartman, "Worker Rights and Low Wage Industrialization: How to Avoid Sweatshops," 688-89.
61. Matt Zwolinski and Ben Powell, "The Ethical and Economic Case for Sweatshop Labor: A Critical Assessment," (San Diego: University of San Diego, 2011
62. Wertheimer, Exploitation: 230. I should stress, however, that Wertheimer puts forward the model of a hypothetical competitive market only as a model of fairness and only as one that is plausible in "a certain range of cases." There has been an unfortunate tendency in the literature, I think, to single out this idea as the core of a general theory of fairness and of exploitation. Construed as such, as numerous commentators have pointed out, it is barely plausible. But Wertheimer's book, as I read it, does not attempt to set out any general theory of the unfairness that lies at the heart of exploitation. Commentators who focus too narrowly on the model of competitive markets are thus likely to miss the rich and context-sensitive analysis that pervades the remainder of the book, where Wertheimer reaches penetrating insights about fairness without attempting to squeeze them into an overarching theory.
63. Denis Arnold has asserted that sweatshop employers often have monopsony power over workers, but offers no evidence in support of his claim. See Arnold, "Working Conditions: Safety and Sweatshops," 651, n. 63. It is, of course, true that sweatshops do not operate in an environment of perfect competition, but although he is somewhat imprecise with his terminology, this could hardly have been what Wertheimer had in mind in setting forth a hypothetical competitive market as a model of fairness. After all, in perfectly competitive markets prices are equal to the marginal cost of production and thus profits are zero. But it would be grossly implausible to say that profit as such constitutes sufficient evidence of exploitation.
64. For a more extended discussion of the irrelevance of models of perfect competition to charges of exploitation, see Matt Zwolinski, "Price Gouging and Market Failure," in Gerald Gaus, Julian Lamont, and Christi Favor, ed., Essays on Philosophy, Politics & Economics: Integration and Common Research Projects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010
65. Powell, "In Reply to Sweatshop Sophistries," 1032-33.
66. Arnold, "Exploitation and the Sweatshop Quandry," 252-53;
67. Arnold, "Working Conditions: Safety and Sweatshops," 643.
68. Arnold and Bowie, "Sweatshops and Respect for Persons," 234.
69. Gordon G. Sollars and Fred Englander, "Sweatshops: Kant and Consequences," Business Ethics Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2007): 118-20.
70. Actually, Denis Arnold and Norman Bowie did write an article in response to Sollars and Englander, but had nothing more to say about betterthe present question than that they felt that Sollars and Englander had ignored some of the claims they had made in defense of their position and had hence failed to engage their argument "in a substantive manner" Denis G. Arnold and Norman E. Bowie, "Respect for Workers in Global Supply Chains: Advancing the Debate Over Sweatshops," Business Ethics Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2007): 136-37. Having read the passages to which Arnold and Bowie refer in their response, however, it is not at all clear to me what substantive argument or claim they believe Sollars and Englander have ignored.
71. Snyder, "Needs Exploitation," 390.
72. I have discussed this problem before in Zwolinski, "Sweatshops, Choice, and Exploitation," 707-10;
73. The Ethics of Price Gouging," Business Ethics Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2008): 356-60.
74. Greater detail in "Exploitation and Neglect," (San Diego: University of San Diego
75. The original statement of this concern comes from Alan Wertheimer in Wertheimer, Exploitation: 289-93.
76. Jeremy C. Snyder, "Efficiency, Equality, and Price Gouging:AResponse to Zwolinski," Business Ethics Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2009): 305-06.
77. This piece was published in response to my own Matt Zwolinski, "Price Gouging, Non-Worseness, and Distributive Justice," Business Ethics Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2009
78. Snyder, "Efficiency, Equality, and Price Gouging:AResponse to Zwolinski," 306. Snyder is actually discussing exploitation as it pertains to price gouging in the quoted material, but I believe, given what he has written about the topic elsewhere, that he would support the extension of his claim to sweatshop labor as well.
79. Chris Meyers, "Wrongful Beneficence: Exploitation and Third World Sweatshops," Journal of Social Philosophy 35, no. 3 (2004): 324-25.
80. Melvin Eisenberg, "The Principle of Unconscionability," in Law and Economics Workshop (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Law School, 2009), 15-16.
81. See, for an extended discussion, Gary Chartier, "Sweatshops, Labor Rights, and Comparative Advantage," Oregon Review of International Law 10, no. 1 (2008
82. Thomas W. Pogge, "World Poverty and Human Rights," Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2005): 7.
83. Careful consideration of this point is necessary in order to avoid the fallacy that Kevin Carson has described as "vulgar libertarianism," in which one appeals to the virtues of free markets in order to justify some aspect of the existing social order, thereby failing to recognize or appreciate the extent to which the existing social order is not an ideally free market but a corporatist system in which the powers of government are all-too-frequently used to enhance the power of land and business interests at the expense of the poor and working classes. See, for a discussion, Kevin A. Carson, "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy," (2007), http://www.mutualist.org/id47. html., chap. 4.
84. See above, Section III.
85. Wertheimer, Exploitation: 9-10;
86. Mikhail Valdman, "Exploitation and Injustice," Social Theory and Practice: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2008
87. Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong, 74;
88. John E. Roemer, Free to Lose (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 130.
89. Wertheimer, Exploitation, 9.
90. Meyers, "Wrongful Beneficence: Exploitation and Third World Sweatshops," 324-25.
91. Roemer, Free to Lose, 130.
92. Sample, Exploitation: What it is and Why it's Wrong, 74.
93. This point is argued at greater length by Vladman in Valdman, "Exploitation and Injustice," 558-65.
94. Young, "Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model," 114.
95. Snyder, "Exploitation and Sweatshop Labor: Perspectives and Issues," 195.
96. A more general form of the question I ask here is posed (and answered in the negative) by Wertheimer in Wertheimer, Exploitation, 234.
97. The discussion which follows benefited tremendously from discussion with Daniel Silvermint, who discusses them in Daniel Silvermint, "Oppression and Victim Agency," Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2011
98. Young, "Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model," 119.
99. Again for a helpful discussion of these issues, see Silvermint, "Oppression and Victim Agency."
100. This was not always the case. The idea of state exploitation has a rich history among both classical liberal and socialist thinkers that contemporary philosophy appears to have largely lost sight of. Helpful overviews, however, can be found in Leonard Liggio, "Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism," Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977
101. Ralph Raico, "Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio's Paper," Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977
102. Roderick Long, "Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class," Social Philosophy and Policy 15, no. 2 (1998
103. Ralph Raico, "Liberalism, Marxism, and the State," Cato Journal 11, no. 3 (1992
104. Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes," in Ralph Raico, ed., Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010
105. O'Neill, "Between Consenting Adults," 123.
106. EvenMarx recognized the potential for this form of exploitation.Witness his discussion of Napoleon's 1851 coup in his pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "This executive power, with its enormous bureaucracy and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy. The Legitimist monarchy and the July monarchy added nothing but a greater division of labor, growing in the same measure-as the division of labor within bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for slate administration. Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher general interest, snatched from the activity of society's members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France⋯ . All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor ⋯ under the second Bonaparte [Napoleon III] ⋯ the state [seems] to have made itself completely independent. As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position ⋯ thoroughly." Cited in Raico, "Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio's Paper," 179-80.
107. The locus classicus of this analysis is James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962
108. More recent explorations can be found in James Buchanan, R. D. Tollison, and Gordon Tullock, Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society (Texas A & M University, College Station, 1980
109. Gordon Tullock, R. D. Tollison, and C. K. Rowley, "The Political Economy of Rent Seeking," (Boston: Kluwer, 1988
110. See, for a discussion, Patricia J. Euzent and Thomas L. Martin, "Classical Roots of the Emerging Theory of Rent Seeking: The Contribution of Jean-Baptiste Say," History of Political Economy 16, no. 2 (1984
111. Ann Cudd, Analyzing Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006
112. Coercion that is employed for paternalistic purposes, for instance, might be unjust but is not exploitative insofar as it does not involve an unfair or degrading advantage-taking. See, for a discussion, Alan Wertheimer, Coercion, Studies in Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).