This paper engages in the debate on how to understand the concept of exploitation. It examines when an interaction or a relationship can be called exploitative and when we must rather refer to it as unjust, unfair, bad or morally wrong in some other respect. In order to engage with this question, the paper starts from the observation that there are two paradigmatic cases of exploitation – interpersonal micro-cases and cases of structural exploitation such as in capitalist societies – which any conception of exploitation should be able to cover simultaneously. At the same time theories of exploitation usually refer to two intuitions about the wrong-making features of exploitation: Firstly, to what I suggest to call the deontological intuition, that is to the disrespect or instrumentalization present in cases of exploitation: We condemn exploitative interactions, not just because the exploiter gains from them but because the exploiter uses another person or her vulnerabilities for realizing personal gains. Secondly, we find exploitation problematic, because it implies that the exploiter takes unfair advantage of the exploited. Call this the unfairness intuition.
My working thesis is that all available conceptions of exploitation fail in covering both paradigmatic examples of exploitation and both intuitions about the wrong-making feature of exploitation simultaneously. The paper argues that the distributive account succeeds in explaining the unfairness of capitalism, but cannot account for the deontological intuition in cases of interpersonal exploitation occurring against a just background-structure. The sufficiency-account partly explains the deontological intuition in interpersonal cases but fails to account for the exploitative nature of capitalism in a welfare state. Similarly, force-inclusive accounts cannot explain how capitalism in a well functioning welfare state can nevertheless be coercive and hence exploitative. The best available account that is in a position to consider both examples as exploitative with regard to both intuitions is the recently developed domination-based account of exploitation. The domination-based account understands exploitation as a subclass of domination, hence in terms of “procedural injury to status” (Vrousalis, 2013: 151).
