Monique Deveaux (editor) - Exploitation: From Practice to Theory

Exploitation

Studies in Social and Global Justice

Series editors: Ben Holland, Lecturer in International Relations, The University of Nottingham, Tony Burns, Associate Professor, The University of Nottingham

As transnational interactions become more prevalent and complex in our interconnected world, so do the questions of social justice that have often featured in political discourse. From new debates in human rights and global ethics to changing patterns of resistance and precarity in the global economy, via an interrogation of the impact of climate change, Studies in Social and Global Justice publishes books that grapple with a broad array of critical issues faced in the world today.

Labour and Transnational Action in Times of Crisis , edited by Andreas Bieler, Roland Erne, Darragh Golden, Idar Helle, Knut Kjeldstadli, Tiago Matos and Sabina Stan

A Human Right to Culture and Identity: The Ambivalence of Group Rights , by Janne Mende

Exploitation: From Practice to Theory , edited by Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch

Social Institutions and the Politics of Recognition: From Hegel to the Present , by Anthony Burns (forthcoming)

Exploitation

From Practice to Theory

Edited by
Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch

London New York

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Copyright 2017 Selection and editorial matter Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch. Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN:HB 978-1-78660-203-9

PB 978-1-78660-204-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-78660-203-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78660-204-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-78660-205-3 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch

Richard W. Miller

Maeve McKeown

Waheed Hussain

Charles W. Mills

Anne Phillips

Vida Panitch

Agomoni Ganguli Mitra

Lyn da Lange

Heather Widdows

M. Shaiful Islam and Des Gasper

Ruth J. Sample

Jeremy Snyder

Monique Deveaux and Vida Panitch

In so doing, it challenges leading philosophical accounts of exploitation to confront globalized, racialized, and gendered practices which, in our considered judgements, are clearly exploitative. That dominant accounts cannot readily explain why such practices are exploitative does not imply that they are not so; rather, it more likely suggests the inadequacy, or at the very least, incompleteness, of these accounts of exploitation. Their inadequacies are laid bare when we move backwards, as it were, from practice to theory by looking to social relations and practices rife with unfair advantage taking, and from there constructing an account of exploitation that can expose, and provide solutions to, exploitative practices in our nonideal world.

Contemporary theoretical discussions of exploitation tend to align with either the liberal or Marxist traditions. Those who take a broadly liberal approach seek to determine the presence of exploitation by asking whether particular transactions between individuals have been marred by impaired consent and/or unfair price. Conceiving of exploitation as the result of an unfair or fraudulent contractual arrangement between two consenting parties allows for the important insight, advanced most notably by Alan Wertheimer, that some exploitative transactions may nonetheless be mutually advantageous.

According to the Marxian-structuralist model, a focus on consent, fairness, and benefit sharing is inadequate, as is a preoccupation with individual exchanges more generally. From this perspective, the liberal-transactional approach fails to take into account the trenchant and institutionalized inequalities that consistently make some agents exploitable by others. And by focusing as it does on two-party exchanges that abstract away from the concrete realities and background injustices against which such exchanges transpire, it provides an overly narrow theoretical framework. As such, it fails to acknowledge and address the reality that the victims of exploitation generally come from among the marginalized, the oppressed, and the vulnerable that, in essence, exploitative arrangements track preexisting global, racial, and gender injustices. Focusing on issues of impaired consent and unfair transactions leads us to underestimate occurrences of exploitation, as well as the depth of our collective responsibility to address the social conditions that render some so much more exploitable than others.

However, transactional approaches that analyse exploitative practices in terms of the pernicious elements of specific two-party transactions bear certain advantages that make the view philosophically attractive. The term exploitation is among the most widely applied of moral concepts, often without precision, and carries profound rhetorical force. If we are concerned to distinguish its rhetorical use from its normative use, we must be careful not to deploy the term whenever we intend to call something unfair, unjust, harmful, oppressive or the like. If exploitation becomes synonymous with injustice, it risks losing its normative force; and theorizing about it loses its normative value.

Moreover, focusing on individual exchanges enables us to identify cases of manipulation, fraud, and the withholding of fair benefits for which particular persons can and should be held accountable. A significant shortcoming of the structural approach is that it can lose sight of the specific agential aspects of exploitation that is, troubling features of certain transactions that are critical to explaining why this particular exchange, in this instance but not others, is exploitative. In this regard, the transactional model offers a valued strategy by which to expose the harms perpetrated by exploiters as such, rather than the myriad harms generated by their participation in an unjust social order. Particular agents, based on their transactional behaviours towards concrete others, can and should be sanctioned for exploiting, quite apart from whatever duties we all bear to correct institutionalized injustices.

This volume seeks to push past the familiar and increasingly unhelpful binary in exploitation theory by drawing on and extending the best insights from both traditions. It takes as its key question whether we can, in a meaningful sense, pay close attention to the socio-structural injustices that render some exploitable at the hands of others while heeding the relational and agential nature of transactional exploitation. Our contributors navigate these waters by taking concrete examples of practices most of us deem exploitative and demonstrate that neither of the two traditional models fully allows us to explain the nature of the exploitation in question. The chapters focus on the ways that structural injustices give rise to social inequalities, which in turn make possible exploitative practices. Rather than dismissing questions of consent and fair benefit sharing, however, as many structural analyses do, our authors take these concepts seriously and attempt to integrate them into a broader and more structurally informed analysis of exploitation in practice. In each chapter, what the author seeks to demonstrate is that exploitation runs deeper than the liberaltransactional model allows, but also that it is a mistake to conflate a duty not to exploit specific others with a more general duty to correct injustices in the social order.