|
Article Excerpt
1. Introduction
Exploiting a person involves taking advantage of him, his attributes, or his circumstances for someone else's benefit, typically for one's own. Yet while some such "advantage-takings" seem morally objectionable, such as when loan sharks overcharge desperate people ignored by legitimate lenders, others don't seem morally troubling, such as when poker players bluff their risk-averse opponents. (1) So when is it morally objectionable to take advantage of others for one's own benefit? When, in short, is it morally objectionable to exploit others? (2) For some, the answer at least partly depends on whether what the exploiter uses to take advantage of a person is the fact that this person is, or has been, the victim of injustice.
For instance, in her 2003 book on exploitation, Ruth Sample argues that "if we gain advantage from an interaction with another, and that advantage is due in part to an injustice he has suffered, we have failed to give him appropriate respect." (3) On her view, gaining advantage from an injustice that someone has suffered is sufficient for wrongful exploitation. (4) In his Marxist-inspired account of exploitation, John Roemer writes that "we view exploitation as a bad thing only when it is the consequence of an unjust unequal distribution in the means of production." (5) On his view, taking advantage of an injustice--particularly an injustice in the distribution of the means of production--is necessary for wrongful exploitation. And in his critical discussion of Marxist accounts of exploitation, Will Kymlicka claims that the merits of a wrongful exploitation claim at least partly depend on whether "people have the sort of access to resources that enable them to make whatever decisions concerning work, leisure, and risk best suit their goals in life." (6) For Kymlicka, having at least some access to these resources is a requirement of distributive justice. (7) And so, on his view, taking advantage of an injustice in the distribution of these resources is at least a contributing factor to exploitation's wrongness.
To be clear, neither ! nor the aforementioned authors are concerned with cases in which one merely takes advantage of some injustice for one's own benefit. After all, architects who proposed new designs for the former World Trade Center site were, in a sense, taking advantage of an injustice, but surely this fact alone provides no reason to think that they acted wrongly. Nor are we concerned with cases in which one takes advantage of a person who, by coincidence, also happens to be a victim of injustice. Most people, after all, can reasonably claim to be victims of some injustice (e.g., a friend's broken promise), and I presume that we should resist any theory of wrongful exploitation that entails its near ubiquity. Rather, we are concerned with cases in which person B is the victim of injustice, and person A takes advantage of the negative effects that B's being the victim of injustice has had on B, for A's own benefit. (8) For brevity, I will refer to this simply as Taking Advantage of Injustice.
The view that there is something wrong with Taking Advantage of Injustice is intuitively plausible. After all, we typically think that those who suffer from injustice deserve assistance or compensation (or both). And while few believe that everyone has an obligation to assist or compensate victims of injustice, we tend to think that at a minimum, victims of injustice deserve our compassion. If Joe is the victim of a serious injustice, it seems at least callous to be indifferent to his plight, even if one is not its cause. But to turn Joe's suffering to one's own advantage--to use it to secure benefits for oneself--seems to go beyond mere callousness. Perhaps we can excuse someone who says: "I'm aware that Joe suffers from injustice, but since I am not its cause, it is not my affair." But it seems deplorable to react to Joe's misfortune by devising ways to turn it into profits for oneself, especially if this is done at Joe's expense. Nevertheless, I will argue that these intuitions, though powerful, do not vindicate the view that there is an important relationship between wrongful exploitation and Taking Advantage of Injustice. Indeed, I will argue that Sample, Roemer, and Kymlicka are wrong to think that Taking Advantage of Injustice is sufficient, necessary, or even a contributing factor to exploitation's wrongness, respectively. While some forms of exploitation may be wrong and unjust, and while there may be evidentiary connections between Taking Advantage of Injustice and wrongful exploitation, I will argue that on any reasonable conception of justice, whether person A wrongly exploits person B is unaffected by whether A Takes Advantage of Injustice in her dealings with B. The view that there is something wrong with Taking Advantage of Injustice, I believe, misidentifies the attributes of a person that it is wrong to benefit from. There are some personal attributes that one should not take advantage of for personal gain, but, in themselves, the attributes of being the victim of injustice or being badly off because one is the victim of injustice, I will argue, are not among them.
I begin by examining the claim that there are important connections between wrongful exploitation and Taking Advantage of Injustice--that Taking Advantage of Injustice is necessary for wrongful exploitation (Roemer), that it is sufficient (Sample), and that it is a contributing factor (Kymlicka and also Sample). Mainly I will assume the burden of proof and argue that there are no such connections rather than respond to arguments purporting that there are. I do this partly out of necessity, because the aforementioned authors, with the exception of Sample, don't really offer arguments that when one wrongly Takes Advantage of Injustice, the wrongness therein is related to the fact that it is injustice that has been taken advantage of. Indeed, even Sample doesn't offer much in defense of this point. She argues that we fail to show proper respect for persons when we exploit those whose bargaining position has been weakened by injustice, but she doesn't really argue that in such cases, it is the fact that a person has been the victim of injustice that makes his exploitation wrong rather than the fact that he is in a weak bargaining position. (9) In any case, where there are arguments on offer connecting wrongful exploitation to Taking Advantage of Injustice, I will consider them. But for the most part I will be playing offense, arguing that there are no such connections.
2. Is Taking Advantage of Injustice Necessary for Wrongful
Exploitation?
In their work on exploitation, Roemer and Kymlicka are concerned with cases in which wealthy capitalists take advantage of desperate workers who, through no fault of their own, lack access to the means of production or to the resources needed to live fulfilling lives, respectively. To examine the role of injustice in judgments of wrongful exploitation, however, it may help to consider simpler and less controversial cases. To this end, imagine that person B is sitting at a cafe, minding his own business, when he is attacked by four men who drag him into a van, drive off with him, rob him, beat him within an inch of his life, and leave him to die by the side of a desolate road. Suppose also that B has done nothing to deserve such treatment. Now suppose that person A, the only passing motorist, spots B lying by the side of the road and offers to help, but only for a price. B explains that without immediate medical attention he will surely die, and that because he has been robbed, he lacks the means to pay. A, however, is unmoved, and offers to help B only if B agrees to pay her 75% of his future earnings. Seeing no reasonable alternative, B accepts. (10) A then drives B to the nearest hospital, where, after months of treatment, B is sent home and begins to rebuild his life. Upon receiving his first paycheck B is reluctant to send 75% of it to A, but suppose that he is legally compelled to do so because, in his country, the law recognizes all promises as legally binding. Call this the Stranded case.
I take it that in the Stranded case, A wrongly exploited B. What is more, A clearly Took Advantage of Injustice--she took advantage of the negative effects that B's being the victim of injustice had on B, for her own benefit. But what role does the fact that A Took Advantage of Injustice play in our assessment of his conduct's wrongness? To answer this, imagine that B was a victim of bad luck rather than injustice. Suppose, for instance, that B was driving on a desolate road when, after blowing a tire, he crashed into the guardrail, lost consciousness, and wound up on the side of the road, bloody and battered, nearing death. Surely A's offer to help B for 75% of his future earnings would still be wrongly exploitative. Indeed, I suspect that this offer would be no less wrongly exploitative than it was in the Stranded case. At a minimum, this shows that contra Roemer, Taking Advantage of Injustice is not necessary for wrongful exploitation. It also suggests that Taking Advantage of Injustice may contribute nothing to our overall assessment of exploitation's wrongness.
The above argument, however, is a bit too quick. After all, one might argue that even if B was a victim of bad luck, A nevertheless Took Advantage of injustice in her dealings with B because she took advantage of a resource inequality. But surely not all resource inequalities are unjust, and I maintain that the injustice of the resource inequality between...
|
