Exploitation and effective altruism

Abstract

How could it be wrong to exploit – say, by paying sweatshop wages – if the exploited party benefits? How could it be wrong to do something gratuitously bad – like giving to a wasteful charity – if that is better than permissibly doing nothing? Joe Horton argues that these puzzles, known as the Exploitation Problem and All or Nothing Problem, have no unified answer. I propose one and pose a challenge for Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem.

Keywords

the All or Nothing Problem exploitation the nonworseness claim deontology effective altruism supererogation prerogatives moral obligation

Introduction

Effective altruists: relax. You are not accused of exploiting anyone. This paper is about the moral links between exploitation and ineffective altruism.

To exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them, like the sweatshop owner who pays pennies to desperate workers. The ‘ineffective altruist’, meanwhile, is someone who helps in a wasteful or frivolous way, like the philanthropist who picks a corrupt charity over the real deal.¹

When the consequences are bad, as they often are, it is easy to see why exploiting and wasting should be morally wrong. What’s not to loathe about the abusive sweatshop owner, or the donor who looks the other way as her cash is siphoned off by seedy middlemen?

Our feelings get mixed, however, when the acts are beneficial. Instead of the abuser, think of the sweatshop owner who gives his consenting employees a better deal than they would otherwise have (without any slime on the side – no racketeering, strong-arming local governments, etc.). Instead of the donor funding bogus charities, suppose the gift is partly squandered but still able to do a lot of good (far more than would be achieved by permissibly redoing one’s kitchen). These actions still seem wrong; we are still talking about wasted cash and grimy sweatshops. But how could they be wrong, if they are preferable to the permissible status quo? In the case of exploitation, this puzzle is called the ‘Exploitation Problem’ (Horton, 2019).² In the case of the ineffective altruist, it is called the ‘All or Nothing Problem’ (Horton, 2017).³

At first glance, these problems seem intimately linked. But Joe Horton, who has done more than anyone to develop them, thinks they are fundamentally separate, because there is no unified solution. His solution to the Exploitation Problem doesn’t cover the altruist, and his solution to the All or Nothing Problem doesn’t extend to the exploiter (2019: 478–479).

After laying out the problems in more detail (second section), my first aim will be to push back against Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem, which may only work given special bargaining conditions (third section). We should want a general solution. My second aim is to show that there is one: a recent solution to the All or Nothing Problem can be extended to all relevant cases of exploitation (fourth section). Our two problems are fundamentally one, and we can solve them in one swoop.

Two problems

Horton (2019: 469) sets up the Exploitation Problem with a stylized case.

Suppose a stranger, whom I’ll call Bob, desperately needs $1,000 for a medical procedure to save his eyesight, but rather than give him your $1,000, you take advantage of him by striking a deal: he gets the money only if he works in your sweatshop for 100 days – working ‘16 hours a day, seven days a week, with no breaks’ (Horton, 2019: 469). It seems wrong to exploit poor Bob like this. And yet, supposing he would leap at the chance to work even in a sweatshop, your offer doesn’t seem worse than permissibly leaving Bob to suffer a fate he considers even more miserable.

We have a tension here. On the one hand, it appears:

Wrong to Exploit

It is wrong to give Bob the $1,000 in exchange for sweatshop labor.

After all, by putting strings on the cash rather than giving it freely, you are taking advantage of Bob for your own profit. That said, since you didn’t cause Bob’s problems (and supposing you rightfully own your money), it seems:

Permissible to Keep Cash

It is permissible to keep your $1,000.

From this, it is natural to infer that you ought to keep the money rather than exploit Bob, given the following principle, which I call:

Worse to Do Wrong

If A is wrong and B is permissible, then you ought to do B rather than A.

And yet exploitation – when it is consensual and beneficial – doesn’t seem ‘worse’ in this sense:

No Worse to Exploit

It’s not the case that you ought to keep the $1,000 rather than giving it to Bob in exchange for sweatshop labor.

This is the Exploitation Problem.

At first glance, the crux of the problem is Worse to Do Wrong. This principle links wrongness, an overall deontic property, to facts about what ‘ought rather’ be done, which are a matter of how options fare in pairwise comparisons.

This principle is also at the heart of Horton’s puzzle about ineffective altruism: the ‘All or Nothing Problem’. The case is again stylized. A building is about to collapse onto two children. You could save one by holding open a small escape route, which would crush both of your arms. Or you could just as easily save both by holding open a bigger escape route (perhaps reaching a little higher), again at the very same cost of two arms.

We find a familiar tension:

Wrong to Save One

It is wrong to open the small escape route, saving only one child.

After all, you are letting the second child die for no good reason. That said, since you didn’t cause the threat to the children, it seems:

Permissible to Keep Arms

It is permissible to keep your arms, saving no one.

From this, it is natural to infer that keeping your arms is preferable to saving the one child, given:

Worse to Do Wrong

If A is wrong and B is permissible, then you ought to do B rather than A.

And yet saving one doesn’t seem worse:

No Worse to Save One

It’s not the case that you ought to keep your arms rather than saving only one life.

That is the All or Nothing Problem.

Surprisingly, even though both puzzles revolve around the same principle, Horton (2019: 478) thinks ‘the similarity is superficial’. Why? Because he doubts that there is a unified solution. His solution to the Exploitation Problem doesn’t generalize to All or Nothing, and his solution to All or Nothing doesn’t generalize to Exploitation.

I have two points to make. First, Horton’s solution to the Exploitation Problem seems too limited; it only applies in certain cases. Second, Horton is killing two birds with two stones; if we aim at Worse to Do Wrong, we might need only one. Let’s take these points in turn.

Against Horton’s solution

Horton’s solution to the Exploitation Problem is to deny:

Permissible to Keep Cash

It is permissible to keep your $1,000.

It is wrong to keep your money, so this is not a case where you ought to do a wrong option rather than a permissible one. Though you ought to exploit rather than keep, exploiting and keeping are both morally wrong.

But why is it wrong to keep your cash? Because, Horton says, there is a decisively better option. Bob’s 100 days of grueling labor is worth far more to you than $1,000. So, you could spend your surplus profits (or forgo them) to make Bob’s work easier, cutting a kinder deal: Bob gets $1,000, does less work in decent conditions, and you break even. This kind of ‘even deal’ is fabulous for Bob and costless for you, compared to keeping the money. And Horton claims:

Costless Rescue

If you can spare someone a significant harm at no cost to yourself or others, and without violating any moral constraint, it is wrong not to do so. (Horton, 2019: 473)⁴

It’s wrong to keep the cash, then, because you are required to give costless benefits – and cutting an even deal counts as a costless benefit.

Horton’s proposal is interesting and important. The idea is that people who are in a position to exploit, like multinational firms, are obligated at least to cut even deals with their employees – nothing less (cf. Berkey, 2019). If this is right, then exploitative firms are seriously wronging the vulnerable people they contract with (because they aren’t paying enough), and do-nothing firms are seriously wronging those they do not contract with (because they aren’t paying anything). There exists an unconditional obligation to help others when it is possible to help them without paying a net cost.

But Horton’s proposal also has a downside. As a solution to the Exploitation Problem, it may be too limited, since it only works if the exploiter can break even, which isn’t always an option. Just imagine that, whether because of complexities of contract law or market contingencies, you have only three options: Keep the Cash, Exploit Bob, and Give the Cash. The same tension persists:

Wrong to Exploit

It is wrong to give Bob the $1,000 in exchange for sweatshop labor.

Permissible to Keep Cash

It is permissible to keep your $1,000.

Worse to Do Wrong

If A is wrong and B is permissible, then you ought to do B rather than A.

No Worse to Exploit

It’s not the case that you ought to keep the $1,000 rather than giving it to Bob in exchange for sweatshop labor.

Nor can Costless Rescue save the day. Since giving the cash is costly, it’s merely optional. Horton’s solution doesn’t help with this version of the puzzle.

And this is not just some fringe case; it is reasonable to expect that many real-world exploiters lack the option of costless rescue. Take the case of temporary migrant labor. In Hong Kong, many foreign women toil as domestic workers for 15 hours a day, 6 days a week, with no hope of ever achieving permanent residence, much less citizenship – all while under constant threat of deportation: if they cannot find a new employer within 2 weeks of quitting a job, they must leave the country, no matter how long it has been their home (Carens, 2013: 111). This is clearly an exploitative arrangement – much worse than treating migrants fairly, though not worse than closing borders. But it is far from obvious that Hong Kong’s government has the option of an even deal. What would it look like for Hong Kong to break even on its temporary worker policy? The government is dealing with uncertain tradeoffs between incommensurable goods (see Chang, 2002) – economic growth vs. the benefits to immigrants. The government probably has little idea which deals would be costless. And even if such a deal were identified, it might not be politically feasible, if there is no precedent for that sort of generous arrangement. I don’t see a need to insist that, no matter the details of the case, an even deal must be on the menu somewhere, if mutually beneficial exploitation is to be wrong.

That’s my key objection. Horton’s solution to the Exploitation Problem depends on idea that the exploiter could break even. But that needn’t always be an option. The Exploitation Problem could arise even in a three-way choice between costly altruism, the status quo, and enriching exploitation.⁵ Since the possibility of cost-neutral rescue isn’t an essential feature of the exploiter’s predicament, it shouldn’t be essential to our take on the Exploitation Problem.

Now, Horton has a reply available.⁶ What if the possibility of costless rescue really is essential to wrongful exploitation? Horton could insist that it’s not wrong to send Bob to the sweatshop in the three-option case, though it is when an even deal is possible. I think this is probably Horton’s best reply. But it raises a tough question. For notice that, even in the three-option case, profiting off of Bob has the hallmarks of wrongful exploitation. You are taking unfair advantage. You are instrumentalizing Bob’s economic vulnerability to enrich yourself (which suffices for exploitation, on Vrousalis’s view, so long as the interaction is systematic; see Vrousalis, 2013). Why not count this as wrongful exploitation?⁷ Horton might be able to give a persuasive answer. But until then, I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that the Exploitation Problem will crop up even in the three-option case, where costless rescue isn’t possible, and so we should want a solution that applies there, too.

Debunking ‘worse to do wrong’

Is there a general solution to the Exploitation Problem?

There certainly would be, if we could debunk Worse to Do Wrong. That principle seems hard to deny. And yet, it has been denied in some recent work on the All or Nothing Problem. Let’s take a closer look.⁸

The All or Nothing Problem, as a reminder, concerns a choice between (i) saving no one, (ii) saving one person at great cost to you, and (iii) saving that person plus one more, at the same cost. The problem is that we want to say:

Wrong to Save One

It is wrong to open the small escape route, saving only one child.

Permissible to Keep Arms

It is permissible to keep your arms, saving no one.

No Worse to Save One

It’s not the case that you ought to keep your arms rather than saving only one life.

But these are inconsistent with:

Worse to Do Wrong

If A is wrong and B is permissible, then you ought to do B rather than A.

Now, why should we believe Worse to Do Wrong? (Aren’t we looking at a counterexample?) Horton says that the principle is ‘intuitively correct’ (2017: 96). But so are the other claims in the All or Nothing Problem. We need something more than intuitions to break the tie here. Horton suggests a second point in favor of Worse to Do Wrong, which is that:

…there are countless cases that seem to verify it. Suppose, for example, that it is permissible to say something nice, permissible to say nothing, and wrong to say something nasty. [Worse to Do Wrong] implies that you ought to say nothing rather than say something nasty. And that seems the right result. (Horton, 2017: 96)

A fair point. But even false principles are sometimes right. We shouldn’t hang on to a principle when it seems to get things wrong, unless it is supported by a deeper rationale.

Is there such a rationale for Worse to Do Wrong? Portmore thinks so:

I don’t see how we can reject [Worse to Do Wrong] if we are to accept the increasingly popular view that the normative status of an action is to be explained by the reasons for and against it and its alternatives. And I, for one, don’t want to reject this plausible view, as it has proved extremely fruitful in normative theorizing. (2019: 22)⁹

The idea is that we need Worse to Do Wrong to explain the grounds of wrongness. Wrongness depends on how options compare pairwise, and this dependence – Portmore tells us – somehow entails Worse to Do Wrong. But how? Portmore and others must have in mind, however implicitly and unofficially, some specific picture of wrongmaking. What is the picture?

I think it is something like this:

Here, Snedegar (2016: 161) (Figure 1) illustrates the seductive idea that lies behind Worse to Do Wrong. The idea is that to be permissible is to rank high enough on the scale from worst to best (see also Fehige, 1994: 47). To say that x is ‘better’ than y, in the relevant sense, is to say x is more choiceworthy. I take this to be the same as saying that one ought to do x rather than y (in Horton’s preferred terms), or that there is more reason to do x than y (in my preferred terms).^10,11 Snedegar’s basic idea works either way. We compare options pairwise, see which is better, and use the results to generate a ranking of options from least to most choiceworthy, which then determines right and wrong.

Figure 1.

Snedegar’s permissibility bar.

At the peak of the ranking sit the best options (the ones we should and ought to choose).¹² Somewhere below is a cutoff – the ‘permissibility bar’ – separating the wrong (gray) from the permissible (white and black). This picture entails Worse to Do Wrong straightaway. Wrong acts are below the bar; permissible acts are above; and ‘above’ just means ‘better’. Hence our two problems: if doing nothing is over the bar, so is anything at least as far up – whether that be exploiting laborers, or saving only one child. Even if these acts are gratuitously bad, they are over the bar, so they can’t be wrong.

Worse to Do Wrong gets its appeal from a picture of permissible options as those ‘above the bar’ on the scale from worst to best. If we dislodge the picture, we debunk the principle. But the picture, at least at first, seems reasonable. What’s wrong with the idea of a bar on a line?

The answer, I think, is that our best moral theories don’t reduce right and wrong to any single ranking: moral permissibility is multidimensional, not just ‘a cutoff along a single scale from naughty to nice’ (Muñoz, 2020). There is no one line.

The reason why you may keep your arms, even though it’s morally better to save lives, is that, in this case, ‘a cost to you has special significance’, not just for its moral value, but as justification (Muñoz, 2020; Pummer, forthcoming; cf. Gert, 2007 on ‘justifying strength’; Portmore, 2011 on ‘moral-justifying strength’). If someone demands that you save the two kids, ‘It would crush my arms’ is enough to show that refraining is justifiable. Now, there are different ways to say what this justification amounts to. Some would say it consists in a non-moral reason to self-preserve, which counts in favor of self-preservation in a non-moral way.¹³ In my view, the justification consists in a prerogative not to self-harm, which justifies without favoring whatsoever. For simplicity, let us set aside non-moral reasons and stick with:

The Prerogatives Principle

You are required to do x just if, for any alternative y, the reasons to do x outweigh the combined reasons and prerogatives to do y.¹⁴

I will say that prerogatives tend to ‘justify’ acts, or make them ‘easy to justify’. I call an option ‘justifiable’ when it is made permissible by the balance of reasons and prerogatives – and ‘unjustifiable’ when it is not. Whenever I use ‘reason’ it will be short for ‘moral reason’.

But enough about terms. The real point is that permissibility depends partly on reasons and partly on prerogatives, and in general, we have a prerogative to choose less costly options. Reasons and prerogatives are two independent factors. This means that there is the potential for a mismatch – where the morally better option is favored by a weaker prerogative. When this happens, we can get counterexamples to Worse to Do Wrong.¹⁵

Take the building case. Plausibly, you have more reason to save more lives; you also have a prerogative is to save zero, since that is the least costly option for you; but you have no prerogative to save one life rather than two, because saving one is just as costly. A right not to sacrifice doesn’t entail a right to waste your sacrifice!

In this way, saving one can be wrong even though it’s not true that you ought rather to permissibly save zero. What makes saving zero more resiliently permissible is a prerogative, and prerogatives don’t make acts better or more choiceworthy.¹⁶

This is a very natural way to think about the costs of altruism and how they matter; it also shows the shortcomings of the model of the ‘permissibility bar’. If there is just one bar, then whenever an option x is over the bar, and y is no worse, then y must also clear the bar. Every option gets the same amount of moral ‘leeway’ before it becomes wrong; each option, in effect, enjoys the same blanket protection by prerogatives, represented by the distance between the bar and the top. This picture is hopeless if prerogatives can depend on costs. Some options cost more than others, and therefore some options (like doing nothing) can be easier to justify than others (like saving one). Whether an option is ultimately justifiable depends on the balance of moral reasons and the relative costs, not on the position of a single lowered ‘bar’ along a single ranking. Morality is multidimensional, with both reasons and prerogatives, and that is why is it not always worse to do wrong.

Solving the exploitation problem

Now we are ready to solve the Exploitation Problem. We have a tension between:

Wrong to Exploit

It is wrong to give Bob the $1,000 in exchange for sweatshop labor.

Permissible to Keep Cash

It is permissible to keep your $1,000.

No Worse to Exploit

It’s not the case that you ought to keep the $1,000 rather than giving it to Bob in exchange for sweatshop labor.

Worse to Do Wrong

If A is wrong and B is permissible, then you ought to do B rather than A.

But now we can reject Worse to Do Wrong. We can say: you may keep the cash, you may not exploit, and yet keeping isn’t better than exploiting. Again, the key is that we have two suboptimal options, only one of which is protected by a prerogative. There is a right not to help, but no right to help in one way (exploiting) rather than another (gifting).

This is a simple but (I hope) decisive reply to the Exploitation Problem. There isn’t pressure to accept Worse to Do Wrong if we believe in prerogatives, and so there is no conceptual tension between our three intuitions. We can coherently say that there is most (moral) reason to give Bob the cash, and least (moral) reason to keep it, even though there is a greater prerogative to keep than there is to exploit. That is how exploiting could be wrong even if it’s no worse than permissibly keeping the cash.

That said, solving the Exploitation Problem is hardly the end of the philosophical problems of exploitation. We have shown that exploiting Bob could coherently be wrong, despite being mutually beneficial and consensual, but it is still somewhat puzzling why such an action should be wrong. Even if we jettison Worse to Do Wrong, there remains a tension between Wrong to Exploit and No Worse to Exploit. If exploiting Bob really is better for everyone, why should it be wrong?¹⁷

One idea is that exploitation is wrong for the same reason as ineffective altruism: it doesn’t do enough to benefit others. When you send Bob to the sweatshop, you are benefiting him more than you would by not transacting. But you benefit him far less than you would by simply giving him the money.

True enough, but this can’t be the whole story. Recall that, in the case of ineffective altruism, the agent has a prerogative to do what’s in their interests, even if it’s not best for others. You don’t have to save the kids because it costs you your arms. Well, giving the money to Bob ‘costs’ you the fruits of his labor. Why shouldn’t you have a prerogative to exploit him and enrich yourself? There has to be something else going on in the case of exploitation: something wrong about it, something deeper than a mere failure of altruism, something that explains why we don’t have a prerogative to enrich ourselves through exploitation.¹⁸ The problem is elusive. It isn’t just that exploiting essentially involves a net harm, outright coercion, or total callousness – it doesn’t.¹⁹ If we want to show that exploitation is really wrong even when it’s beneficial and consensual, we need some deeper account of exploitation’s moral core.

Exploitation, more so than vanilla ineffective altruism, remains morally puzzling. But I hope to have shown that source of the puzzle is not Worse to Do Wrong. If I’m right, we have learned something surprising by solving Horton’s Exploitation Problem. What makes exploitation puzzling is not anything general about the nature of permissibility; it is something specific to the messy mix of intuitions we feel when exploiters make things better.

Conclusion

This paper has argued for two points about the wrong of exploitation and the obligation of effective altruism.

First, Horton’s take on the Exploitation Problem may be too specific: it only applies when there is the option for an even deal, triggering an obligation of costless rescue. But some apparent cases of wrongful exploitation don’t feature such an option. We may want a solution that gives a unified treatment of these cases whether or not an even deal is on the table.

Second, I’ve proposed a unified solution to the Exploitation Problem and the All or Nothing Problem. You have a right not to sacrifice – but that doesn’t entail a right to waste your sacrifice. You have a right not to transact – but that doesn’t entail a right to exploit. Sending Bob to the sweatshop, like saving just the one child, can be wrong even though it’s not true that you ought rather to permissibly do nothing. The key is that there is a moral mismatch between reasons – which in this case favor altruism – and prerogatives, which in this case protect the choice not to get involved.

There is still plenty of analysis left to do.²⁰ But thanks to philosophers like Horton, we are beginning to hear harmonies and counterpoints emerge from a cacophony of paradoxes. ‘Commonsense’ ethics is making ever more sense.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

For helpful discussion on this paper and/or the All or Nothing Problem, I would like to thank Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, Kieran Setiya, Chris Tucker, Theron Pummer, Kerah Gordon-Solmon, Toby Handfield, and the participants in the 2020 Winter Ethics Workshop Miniseries on the All or Nothing Problem. Special thanks to two anonymous referees for PPE for their clear and insightful comments, which helped me focus the paper on its core ideas; many thanks as well to Andrew Williams. My debt to Joe Horton’s work is too obvious to mention, but I will mention it anyway. Finally, I am delighted to thank Mirjam Müller for invaluable comments on an early draft, and for many hours of conversation about the ethics of exploitation, which sparked my interest in the topic.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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