Exploitation and Friendship

I argue that Alan Wertheimer's account of unfair advantage‐taking, though flawed, is more plausible than his critics believe. Indeed, I argue that his proposed model for assessing fair exchange— the friendship model —according to which a transaction's terms are unfair to the extent that they deviate from the terms upon which we would expect good friends to transact—is compelling and can serve as the basis for a plausible theory of wrongful exploitation. Wertheimer, I will argue, was wrong to think that friends would transact at “hypothetical market prices.” But he was right to think that friendship norms can provide a plausible account of fair exchange. In this paper, I develop a friendship‐based account of wrongful exploitation, and I argue that it has important advantages over rival theories.