This short book attempts to develop an account of exploitation as degradation, as treating someone or something as having less value than that person or thing actually has. Sample argues that this view is superior to this reviewer's ‘unfairness’ account (1996) and Robert Goodin's ‘vulnerability’ approach (1995). She accepts my contention that much exploitation is consensual and mutually beneficial, but she maintains that neither Goodin nor I adequately explain the way in which relationships among intimates as well as strangers can be exploitative or why exploitation is bad. After developing her account of exploitation, Sample applies it to the family and to globalization.

This book covers a great deal of ground in relatively few pages. It contains extensive discussions of the literature on exploitation, feminist philosophy of the family, commodification and globalization. It is clearly written, generally sensible and frequently perceptive. Still, and with all my no doubt excessively defensive cards on the table, I am not persuaded.

Why not? First, and most generally, I am not particularly sympathetic to Sample's conceptual ‘essentialism’, to explaining what exploitation ‘is’. Some argue that if a transaction is beneficial to B and if B consents, then it cannot be exploitative even if the transaction is unfair or degrading to B. Sample and I disagree. But does it matter who's right? For even if we were to concede the linguistic point, we would still have to ask what should be said about unfair or degrading mutually beneficial consensual transactions, whether and why they are wrong, and whether or why they should be prohibited. Those are the important questions. Sample suggests, for example, that to say that a transaction is exploitative when it is (merely) unfair does not account for the ‘badness’ of exploitation (p. 2). Not quite. It says that exploitation is bad because it is unfair. If Sample wants to say we should not refer to unfair but not degrading transactions as exploitative, I don't have any strong objection, although I think she is wrong as a matter of common usage. The important task is to identify the way in which transactions can be wrong and what we should do about them, not what words we should use.

Second, although exploitation is a difficult concept, I find degradation to be even more difficult and slippery, and it is not clear that analysing a difficult concept in terms of an even more difficult concept is analytically useful. To see some of the difficulties, consider Sample's claim that degradation involves treating someone as having less value than that person has. Is degradation a function of the way in which A treats B or the effect of A's treatment of B on B? After all, A may treat B in a degrading or disrespectful manner without B feeling degraded or, more importantly, being degraded. Suppose that A seeks out the services of prostitute B, and that A regards B as someone with little value. At the same time, B regards A as pathetic, and while she knows how A regards her, she sees herself as a professional who is, in her own way, exploiting A's need for sexual services. Is B degraded by A? I am inclined to say no.

The distinction between a focus on A's behavior and B's interests surfaces in a third and vexing issue about mutually advantageous exploitation, namely, the contrast between a case in which A neglects B (or fails to transact with B) and one in which A transacts with B in a manner that is unfair or degrading to B, but is better for B than neglect. Granted that it would be better if A transacted with B non-exploitatively, the question remains as to whether it is morally worse for A to neglect B than to act exploitatively towards B if the consequences of neglect are worse for B. Sample suggests that because she offers a ‘nonconsequentialist’ account of exploitation, it explains ‘why we often regard exploitation as worse than neglect, even when the consequences of neglect are worse’ (p. 60). But this moves much too quickly. One need not be any kind of aggregative consequentialist to think that if X is worse for the less well-off person than Y, then X is worse than Y. Sample observes that ‘it is easier to lose sight of the value of other valuable beings when we do not interact with them’ (p. 68). Fair enough. But the fact that one is more likely to ‘lose sight’ of others when we simply neglect them does not show that neglect is not worse. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is not a moral argument.

The previous point is symptomatic of a fourth and more general difficulty in Sample's book. In my view, Sample takes her intuitions or what she takes to be common intuitions a bit too seriously. For example, she considers whether one acts wrongly in not donating a kidney if doing so would save a life. In rejecting Peter Singer's well-known position, she says that she ‘would probably not agree to it’ and that she ‘would not feel’ that she had done something wrong (p. 47, emphasis added). Appeals to intuitions have their place in moral philosophy, to be sure, but the mere fact that she (or I or we) would not feel that she had done something wrong hardly establishes the moral truth about the matter. A similar difficulty occurs when Sample considers the claim that competitive market prices are not exploitative (so I do not exploit you if I ask $500,000 for my small home if that is the market price in my location, but I do exploit you if I get you to pay $50 for an umbrella in a rainstorm). She says that there are market price transactions that ‘we commonly judge to be exploitative’ and that, in her view, ‘some of these judgments are correct. Hence, Wertheimer's view cannot be completely right’ (p. 25). Now my view may not be completely right. Indeed, it may not be right at all. But the fact that we commonly judge transactions to be exploitative or that Sample contends that those views are correct hardly justifies her conclusion.

Finally, I want to consider two specific claims Sample advances with respect to exploitative transactions. First, and quite central to her argument, she maintains that whereas A may not have an obligation to transact with B at all, it remains the case that if A transacts with B, then A must not neglect B's needs or what is necessary for B's flourishing, particularly if A is in a position to provide for those needs. Sample suggests that if I enter into a transaction with a bank teller, I treat her with disrespect if I ‘tolerate wages upon which she cannot decently live’ (p. 69). Now it is not clear why the mere fact that A enters into an arguably limited transaction with B requires A to be quite so responsive to B's life needs. Indeed, it is not clear to me that employers exploit their workers when they fail to provide them with an adequate income. This issue needs much more theoretical work, but I would simply note that the earned income tax credit reflects a different and arguably more attractive principle, namely, that it is society's responsibility to provide an adequate income for those who work, but that it is not necessarily the responsibility of a particular employer to do so, particularly when an employee may not be sufficiently productive to make it profitable to pay her a ‘living wage’.

Second, Sample argues that A exploits B when A gains advantage from an interaction that arises from an injustice. I disagree. Suppose that B needs A's help as a carpenter because someone has maliciously destroyed B's home. Although A takes advantage of this injustice, I can't see that A acts wrongly if A is charging a fair price for his services. He takes advantage of unfairness, to be sure, but he does not take unfair advantage of unfairness. Sample says that my account of exploitation allows us to say that non-exploitative interactions can occur in the context of injustice, but not that those interactions are themselves exploitative (p. 61). Not quite. I argue that interactions that occur under unjust background conditions are not necessarily exploitative simply because the background conditions are unjust, and that we should often focus on the injustice of the background conditions and not displace our moral concern onto the interaction itself. Sample regards this as a defect of my account. I regard it as a virtue.

I have focused on the theoretical structure of Sample's views rather than the application of those views to the family and globalization. My reservations notwithstanding, this book raises many important questions and should be read by anyone interested in the concept of exploitation.