All liberal responsibility-sensitive accounts of international distributive justice share the view that self-inflicted harm must never be redressed by justice. If exploitation is sub-species of injustice and not necessarily reducible to responsibility-sensitive accounts of international injustice then an account of exploitation can provide us with an alternative to responsibility-sensitive approaches to social justice. In the first part of paper I provide a qualifying defence of this claim by critically examining Nicholas Vrousalis’ recent work on exploitation. In the second part of the paper I apply these insights to theories of transnational and international justice via the case of access to welfare rights for EU immigrants and argue that an exploitation-based view does a better job than alternatives in explaining what is wrong with restrictions to EU immigrants’ access to such rights.
