It seems like a scalar solution to the paradox of supererogation also gives a pretty neat answer here. Words like "right," "wrong," "permissible," etc., are simply imperfect paraphrases over lesser and greater degrees of rightness.
So what is wrong with what Alice does? Well, she doesn't do anything strictly "wrong" per se, as "wrong" is just a useful paraphrase. Rather the problem is that she could easily have done something better. She could easily have just not forced Bob to work for her, which would (let us suppose) be much better.
Similarly, giving someone $1000 on the condition that you get to punch them in the face isn't "wrong" per se, assuming they value $1000 over not being punched in the face. It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
>It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
The same could be said of any "unnecessary" purchase you make. It assumes that gifting the other $1000 is good, but that cant be true in general, because then it would also be good for him to gift it back, and youve created a morality pump.
I don't think supererogation makes much sense as a concept -- I think a good analogy is how Christianity thinks about sin; it's impossible for anyone to be sinfree like Jesus was, but Christians aspire to be as good as possible.
It also seems unfair to characterize Bob's situation as "consensual". The meaningful info here is that Bob will die unless Alice intervenes. Suppose an assassin has a gun to Cindy's head. Dave offers to tell the assassin not to kill Cindy, but only if she has sex with Dave. Does Cindy consent to this situation? Doesn't seem like it!
Finally, empirical data suggests that sweatshops actually are beneficial for maximizing utility in poor countries, helping them get rich and enter the first world. Noah Smith has a good article about it [here](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-sweatshops) that discusses the various tradeoffs.
I think the experiment yields different results if Alice's rescue costs are onerous but not dangerous, in the context of superogation. There is a categorical difference between costly and risky.
“ Still, we might wonder if Alice really is obliged to make a dangerous rescue merely because she’ll be compensated by Bob’s labor. (Suppose you’ll be compensated for donating bone marrow. Does that undercut your right not to give it?)”
In this case, it seems easy to note that the “compensation” for donating bone marrow is going to be of a very different kind. It doesn’t eliminate the pain and suffering of the donation process. Whatever specific compensation you are imagining here, there is a reasonable person those doesn’t think it is enough to make up for the harms of donation.
In the case where it’s compensation of $10,000 later for paying $10,000 now, it’s much harder to come up with important differences (though if Alice really needs the $10,000 now to avoid being evicted, it becomes plausible that Bob paying Alice back later isn’t proper compensation).
Notice that theres a wide range of prices at which Alice could save Bob, and have it be mutually beneficial. They are in some way playing an ultimatum game, and it makes sense that Bob would want to feel aversive to paying a high price, even if its still beneficial to him.
Now from the perspective of an external observer, you just need to break the symmetry somehow. For example, if being an Alice is a specialised role, and falling into holes happens to people randomly, then everyone who doesnt plan on being an Alice will side with Bob. I think that well explains the intuition against exploitation, whether its a justification is up to you.
I would absolutely read your thoughts on exploitation as defined by Marx. I have never fully gotten behind Marx, at least in most respects, but this is an area I find myself sympathetic to him, even if it’s an (obviously) loaded term.
Virtue ethically, in each of these situations it would appear that Alice is left in a non-desirable situation: she could become a kinder person by releasing Bob from his pledge, and yet she chooses not to.
This does not quite have bearing on the initial decision to rescue Bob in the first place. If Alice knows that she simply won’t rescue Bob uncompensated, then she should offer the deal and rescue Bob. But if Alice never reconsiders her decision, then she is liable to block her ability to learn how to feel greater sympathy for Bob. She will become an exploiter, and a self-satisfied one at that.
There are some odd wrinkles in this answer, of course. If Alice knows she will be required to become an even better person in the future, then perhaps she will refuse to take that first step to become a slightly better person by rescuing Bob. In that case, this solution eats itself by making Alice even more callous to begin with.
Thus, much of the effectiveness of this solution depends on whether Alice is in a state of trying to pre-game her later self into not becoming a better person in ways that her current self would not like.
I think one possible argument against exploitation comes from externalities, just not the simple effluent-based ones you cited. Paying the lowest possible sweatshop wages, perhaps including indenture of a rescued Bob, supports a social norm of paying the lowest possible wages, which increases the probability that more people are going to have less good lives than they might. Whereas paying more than the minimum it takes for this transaction to be better for the worker than the alternative can spill over into greater welfare throughout society by increasing how much of the generated surplus accrues to the worker. The mention of norms suggests this must be a deontological argument, but I am looking at it purely in terms of consequences.
Of course, this observation triggers thoughts about political philosophy and social organization; what it takes for capitalists to not have monopsony powers over individual workers (unions, Marxism, whatever), etc. But even from the perspective of the individual act, each {mutually beneficial but still maximally exploitive in one direction} act tends to lower the welfare of everyone else in society who faces the bad side of another instance of that transaction. So, perhaps one could argue, giving Bob a better deal than he would accept is not a moral obligation with respect to that transaction in isolation, but because of its spillover effects it is the right thing to do.
I saw my boy's picture in there, so I thought I'd once again jump in to offer some Marxist reflections on this. One thing that Marxists might bring up here is that the abstract thought experiments you're using to try to understand exploitation are entirely ahistorical (they're thought experiments and puzzles, after all), and hence, don't actually serve to penetrate the phenomenon in question. More to the point, using thought experiments like this ends up treating exploitation as primarily a relation between *individuals* who just happen to find themselves in one place or another under certain conditions (for what reason? who cares! all we know is that we're in such-and-such a position and now we gotta figure out what's wrong with it, right?).
Crucially, this mystifies the core insight in Marx that exploitation is a phenomenon that occurs on the *social* level between classes and that the particular exploitation that occurs in capitalism (which is not the same as the kind of exploitation that might exist under feudalism, in which we can still find pits and saviors, but in which one isn't forced to sell one's labor power as a commodity to another) has a specific history. That history is *not* the history of billions of people coming to strike freely enjoined, mutually beneficial agreements with other people under circumstances in less-then-ideal-but-better-than-nothing scenarios. Rather, that history is the very specific and very violent one laid out in, say, closing the commons, driving the peasants off the land, depriving them of the means of production, etc. and altering the social relations in such a way that one class owns and the other labors (I won't repeat my previous series of comments here).
My point here is that once you understand that history, you can see that any notion of "agreement" or "contract" between individuals that is crucial in generating the puzzle in the thought experiments is a farce. The rising bourgeoisie and the newly proletarianized peasant classes don't "strike a bargain" that the former will own and the latter will toil--there is no libertarian transaction here. There's no more puzzle here than there is in asking the question "what's wrong with Alice throwing Bob down the pit and then allowing him to live as her slave?" (maybe this is puzzling to some--I've lost all measures of what people find puzzling, but I find no puzzle with that question). If one also thinks, as Marxists do, that the laboring class is also the class that provides the labor necessary for the reproduction of society, then the answer becomes crystal clear: it's not a fair social arrangement.
(Those not on the left know that this is the case, and they try to essentialize and naturalize the existing social relations as some expression of the natural order. If one is truly an egalitarian, though, these appeals won't sway you any more than an appeal to 'natural slavery' or some other bullshit. Another aside: one might take a brutal Hobbesan realist attitude and say that under circumstances in which one class has so exerted itself against another so as to force it into such a social arrangement, there is no talk of fairness but only raw aggression. Very well! On the one hand, let's not talk about ethical puzzles then; and on the other hand, that's why the Leninist tradition pushes the working class to arm itself and prepare for violence. “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”)
Those thought experiments are from a Marxist political theorist! Forgive me for taking him seriously.
Also I don’t see any reason whatsoever why “abstract thought experiments” would be by nature unable to “penetrate the phenomenon.” All of the most successful sciences use abstract experiments—there’s nothing more “ahistorical” than a controlled laboratory environment. Thought experiments are similar! If you don’t do any abstraction, you can’t learn anything deep, because you’ll just be distracted by spurious correlations.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that thought experiments are the only technique in the toolkit. But every moral philosopher should use them. Even Williams relies on them (with lots of caution and hedging).
Finally, I’m disturbed by your insouciance towards political violence. Even in a war fought for just cause, terror is inexcusable.
Categorically unforgiven for taking that Marxist political theorist seriously! Yeah, not sure what to tell you about that one other than that if I were talking to him, I'd say the same thing I said to you (or, perhaps, more sheepishly, ask him whether he thought that these examples of exploitation have anything to do with what Marx was talking about when he was talking about exploitation).
I'm not sure if I would say that by nature thought experiments fail to penetrate any phenomenon they're concerned with, but I do think that when it comes to the sciences which are concerned with social matters (your histories, your politics, your economics, your ethics, etc.), they're of rather limited use as are the abstractions that we can draw from them. And I do think that often, they tend to obscure very important matters that the historical approach illuminates (an infamous one that us Marxists like to beat up on is the thought experiment in bourgeois economics that starts with something like "assume that you have a ton of bows and arrows for hunting but no shoes, and I have a lot of shoes and no bows or arrows..."). But maybe I misunderstood, and you guys don't think that like, a similar puzzle arises for class exploitation. I think there's also a deeper disagreement here about whether a social science like ethics is also best modeled on the kind of science that's done with laboratory experiments (I guess it's a skepticism of whether ethics is a positivistic science? Am I using that term right? I never know). But I do agree that without any abstraction you can't actually have any science whatsoever.
About the violence, the quote was tongue in cheek (I believe it comes from a piece that Marx wrote after his newspaper offices were raided by the Prussian state, so you can imagine the kind of terror he wanted to visit upon his enemies). But also, don't clutch the pearls too hard! All I was saying is that the Leninists have a response to a kind of political realist who says that social relations are enforced purely by violence and that questions of whether exploitation is wrong or not are immaterial (the answer being, okay, then we'll defeat you through force and we'll see through your hypocrisy when you decry the wrongness of losing your manors and factories). Apart from that, I'm not a believer in absolute non-violence, so I think that does mean that in some cases political violence is acceptable and maybe even necessary (the abolition of slavery, we must remember, was a violent matter). I don't know if that makes me insouciant, but I guess I'm not souciant either. (Also, "terror" is a loaded word camaaaan)
If you're interested in the history of this stuff, don't bother with Cohen. Read Ellen Meiksins Wood ("The Origins of Capitalism" is fantastic) instead. And, for god's sake, stay away from Nozick.
I should also say that I’ve stuck very narrowly to why this puzzle doesn’t arise in the case of Marxist exploitation. I take it that if the method by which the puzzle is resolved there might be extended to other cases as well (lol I guess it would be one in which we think about what’s wrong about how people historically end up in pits. Don’t laugh! It’s plausible!)
It seems like a scalar solution to the paradox of supererogation also gives a pretty neat answer here. Words like "right," "wrong," "permissible," etc., are simply imperfect paraphrases over lesser and greater degrees of rightness.
So what is wrong with what Alice does? Well, she doesn't do anything strictly "wrong" per se, as "wrong" is just a useful paraphrase. Rather the problem is that she could easily have done something better. She could easily have just not forced Bob to work for her, which would (let us suppose) be much better.
Similarly, giving someone $1000 on the condition that you get to punch them in the face isn't "wrong" per se, assuming they value $1000 over not being punched in the face. It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
>It's simply like, why the hell would you do that, as you could easily do something better by not also punching them in the face?
The same could be said of any "unnecessary" purchase you make. It assumes that gifting the other $1000 is good, but that cant be true in general, because then it would also be good for him to gift it back, and youve created a morality pump.
I don't think supererogation makes much sense as a concept -- I think a good analogy is how Christianity thinks about sin; it's impossible for anyone to be sinfree like Jesus was, but Christians aspire to be as good as possible.
It also seems unfair to characterize Bob's situation as "consensual". The meaningful info here is that Bob will die unless Alice intervenes. Suppose an assassin has a gun to Cindy's head. Dave offers to tell the assassin not to kill Cindy, but only if she has sex with Dave. Does Cindy consent to this situation? Doesn't seem like it!
Finally, empirical data suggests that sweatshops actually are beneficial for maximizing utility in poor countries, helping them get rich and enter the first world. Noah Smith has a good article about it [here](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-only-thing-worse-than-sweatshops) that discusses the various tradeoffs.
I think the experiment yields different results if Alice's rescue costs are onerous but not dangerous, in the context of superogation. There is a categorical difference between costly and risky.
“ Still, we might wonder if Alice really is obliged to make a dangerous rescue merely because she’ll be compensated by Bob’s labor. (Suppose you’ll be compensated for donating bone marrow. Does that undercut your right not to give it?)”
In this case, it seems easy to note that the “compensation” for donating bone marrow is going to be of a very different kind. It doesn’t eliminate the pain and suffering of the donation process. Whatever specific compensation you are imagining here, there is a reasonable person those doesn’t think it is enough to make up for the harms of donation.
In the case where it’s compensation of $10,000 later for paying $10,000 now, it’s much harder to come up with important differences (though if Alice really needs the $10,000 now to avoid being evicted, it becomes plausible that Bob paying Alice back later isn’t proper compensation).
Notice that theres a wide range of prices at which Alice could save Bob, and have it be mutually beneficial. They are in some way playing an ultimatum game, and it makes sense that Bob would want to feel aversive to paying a high price, even if its still beneficial to him.
Now from the perspective of an external observer, you just need to break the symmetry somehow. For example, if being an Alice is a specialised role, and falling into holes happens to people randomly, then everyone who doesnt plan on being an Alice will side with Bob. I think that well explains the intuition against exploitation, whether its a justification is up to you.
I would absolutely read your thoughts on exploitation as defined by Marx. I have never fully gotten behind Marx, at least in most respects, but this is an area I find myself sympathetic to him, even if it’s an (obviously) loaded term.
Virtue ethically, in each of these situations it would appear that Alice is left in a non-desirable situation: she could become a kinder person by releasing Bob from his pledge, and yet she chooses not to.
This does not quite have bearing on the initial decision to rescue Bob in the first place. If Alice knows that she simply won’t rescue Bob uncompensated, then she should offer the deal and rescue Bob. But if Alice never reconsiders her decision, then she is liable to block her ability to learn how to feel greater sympathy for Bob. She will become an exploiter, and a self-satisfied one at that.
There are some odd wrinkles in this answer, of course. If Alice knows she will be required to become an even better person in the future, then perhaps she will refuse to take that first step to become a slightly better person by rescuing Bob. In that case, this solution eats itself by making Alice even more callous to begin with.
Thus, much of the effectiveness of this solution depends on whether Alice is in a state of trying to pre-game her later self into not becoming a better person in ways that her current self would not like.
I think one possible argument against exploitation comes from externalities, just not the simple effluent-based ones you cited. Paying the lowest possible sweatshop wages, perhaps including indenture of a rescued Bob, supports a social norm of paying the lowest possible wages, which increases the probability that more people are going to have less good lives than they might. Whereas paying more than the minimum it takes for this transaction to be better for the worker than the alternative can spill over into greater welfare throughout society by increasing how much of the generated surplus accrues to the worker. The mention of norms suggests this must be a deontological argument, but I am looking at it purely in terms of consequences.
Of course, this observation triggers thoughts about political philosophy and social organization; what it takes for capitalists to not have monopsony powers over individual workers (unions, Marxism, whatever), etc. But even from the perspective of the individual act, each {mutually beneficial but still maximally exploitive in one direction} act tends to lower the welfare of everyone else in society who faces the bad side of another instance of that transaction. So, perhaps one could argue, giving Bob a better deal than he would accept is not a moral obligation with respect to that transaction in isolation, but because of its spillover effects it is the right thing to do.
I saw my boy's picture in there, so I thought I'd once again jump in to offer some Marxist reflections on this. One thing that Marxists might bring up here is that the abstract thought experiments you're using to try to understand exploitation are entirely ahistorical (they're thought experiments and puzzles, after all), and hence, don't actually serve to penetrate the phenomenon in question. More to the point, using thought experiments like this ends up treating exploitation as primarily a relation between *individuals* who just happen to find themselves in one place or another under certain conditions (for what reason? who cares! all we know is that we're in such-and-such a position and now we gotta figure out what's wrong with it, right?).
Crucially, this mystifies the core insight in Marx that exploitation is a phenomenon that occurs on the *social* level between classes and that the particular exploitation that occurs in capitalism (which is not the same as the kind of exploitation that might exist under feudalism, in which we can still find pits and saviors, but in which one isn't forced to sell one's labor power as a commodity to another) has a specific history. That history is *not* the history of billions of people coming to strike freely enjoined, mutually beneficial agreements with other people under circumstances in less-then-ideal-but-better-than-nothing scenarios. Rather, that history is the very specific and very violent one laid out in, say, closing the commons, driving the peasants off the land, depriving them of the means of production, etc. and altering the social relations in such a way that one class owns and the other labors (I won't repeat my previous series of comments here).
My point here is that once you understand that history, you can see that any notion of "agreement" or "contract" between individuals that is crucial in generating the puzzle in the thought experiments is a farce. The rising bourgeoisie and the newly proletarianized peasant classes don't "strike a bargain" that the former will own and the latter will toil--there is no libertarian transaction here. There's no more puzzle here than there is in asking the question "what's wrong with Alice throwing Bob down the pit and then allowing him to live as her slave?" (maybe this is puzzling to some--I've lost all measures of what people find puzzling, but I find no puzzle with that question). If one also thinks, as Marxists do, that the laboring class is also the class that provides the labor necessary for the reproduction of society, then the answer becomes crystal clear: it's not a fair social arrangement.
(Those not on the left know that this is the case, and they try to essentialize and naturalize the existing social relations as some expression of the natural order. If one is truly an egalitarian, though, these appeals won't sway you any more than an appeal to 'natural slavery' or some other bullshit. Another aside: one might take a brutal Hobbesan realist attitude and say that under circumstances in which one class has so exerted itself against another so as to force it into such a social arrangement, there is no talk of fairness but only raw aggression. Very well! On the one hand, let's not talk about ethical puzzles then; and on the other hand, that's why the Leninist tradition pushes the working class to arm itself and prepare for violence. “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”)
Those thought experiments are from a Marxist political theorist! Forgive me for taking him seriously.
Also I don’t see any reason whatsoever why “abstract thought experiments” would be by nature unable to “penetrate the phenomenon.” All of the most successful sciences use abstract experiments—there’s nothing more “ahistorical” than a controlled laboratory environment. Thought experiments are similar! If you don’t do any abstraction, you can’t learn anything deep, because you’ll just be distracted by spurious correlations.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that thought experiments are the only technique in the toolkit. But every moral philosopher should use them. Even Williams relies on them (with lots of caution and hedging).
Finally, I’m disturbed by your insouciance towards political violence. Even in a war fought for just cause, terror is inexcusable.
Categorically unforgiven for taking that Marxist political theorist seriously! Yeah, not sure what to tell you about that one other than that if I were talking to him, I'd say the same thing I said to you (or, perhaps, more sheepishly, ask him whether he thought that these examples of exploitation have anything to do with what Marx was talking about when he was talking about exploitation).
I'm not sure if I would say that by nature thought experiments fail to penetrate any phenomenon they're concerned with, but I do think that when it comes to the sciences which are concerned with social matters (your histories, your politics, your economics, your ethics, etc.), they're of rather limited use as are the abstractions that we can draw from them. And I do think that often, they tend to obscure very important matters that the historical approach illuminates (an infamous one that us Marxists like to beat up on is the thought experiment in bourgeois economics that starts with something like "assume that you have a ton of bows and arrows for hunting but no shoes, and I have a lot of shoes and no bows or arrows..."). But maybe I misunderstood, and you guys don't think that like, a similar puzzle arises for class exploitation. I think there's also a deeper disagreement here about whether a social science like ethics is also best modeled on the kind of science that's done with laboratory experiments (I guess it's a skepticism of whether ethics is a positivistic science? Am I using that term right? I never know). But I do agree that without any abstraction you can't actually have any science whatsoever.
About the violence, the quote was tongue in cheek (I believe it comes from a piece that Marx wrote after his newspaper offices were raided by the Prussian state, so you can imagine the kind of terror he wanted to visit upon his enemies). But also, don't clutch the pearls too hard! All I was saying is that the Leninists have a response to a kind of political realist who says that social relations are enforced purely by violence and that questions of whether exploitation is wrong or not are immaterial (the answer being, okay, then we'll defeat you through force and we'll see through your hypocrisy when you decry the wrongness of losing your manors and factories). Apart from that, I'm not a believer in absolute non-violence, so I think that does mean that in some cases political violence is acceptable and maybe even necessary (the abolition of slavery, we must remember, was a violent matter). I don't know if that makes me insouciant, but I guess I'm not souciant either. (Also, "terror" is a loaded word camaaaan)
If you're interested in the history of this stuff, don't bother with Cohen. Read Ellen Meiksins Wood ("The Origins of Capitalism" is fantastic) instead. And, for god's sake, stay away from Nozick.
I should also say that I’ve stuck very narrowly to why this puzzle doesn’t arise in the case of Marxist exploitation. I take it that if the method by which the puzzle is resolved there might be extended to other cases as well (lol I guess it would be one in which we think about what’s wrong about how people historically end up in pits. Don’t laugh! It’s plausible!)