Exploitation and Joint Action

Recent years have seen a growing philosophical interest in the concept of exploitation as well as in putatively exploitative practices, such as commercial surrogacy, sweatshop labor, and medical research in the developing world. This article contributes to the philosophical debate in this area by focusing on a problem about exploitation that has remained largely unexamined until now. The debate has concentrated on the kind of situation where one party to a transaction or relationship, A, exploits another party, B, and A benefits himself/herself. At the same time, philosophers have for the most part ignored cases where A exploits B, but the gains A extracts from B accrue not (only) to A but (also) to a third party, C . This omission is striking because such cases are easily found in the real world. Clinical researchers and their sponsors may exploit research subjects to advance the interests of future patients. Sweatshops may exploit workers in poor countries on behalf of multinational firms and for the benefit of their customers. In fact, it is plausible to claim that, more often than not, several parties stand to gain from putatively exploitative practices in today’s globalized economy. For example, Iris Marion Young (2011, ch. 5) paints a vivid picture of the complex and multilayered network of actors (i.e., sweatshops, multinationals, intermediaries, distributors, retail and wholesale companies, individual and group customers, and so on) who make up one prominent such practice, the global apparel industry. Therefore, in order to be genuinely practically relevant, exploitation theory needs a better grasp of how third parties can be involved in exploitative transactions and arrangements and of the normative significance of such involvement. Young herself, while emphasizing that the circle of those bearing some (mostly forward-looking) responsibility in connection with such transactions and arrangements is much broader than commonly thought, does not systematically distinguish among different kinds of third-party involvement. Our work undertakes such an analysis. We distinguish between different types of cases corresponding to different kinds of involvement in exploitation by the third party. We also argue that these different types of involvement have different moral implications—especially as regards the remedial duties incurred by the third parties. Our main claim is that in many cases third-party beneficiaries can be properly construed as acting together with exploiters in bringing about and/or maintaining the exploitative relationship or transaction. Establishing joint action in such cases is important because, first,