I recently had an interesting online exchange with someone supporting the expulsion of illegal aliens on the grounds that they were being exploited, exploitation was bad and should stop — even if stopping it left them worse off.
In terms of illegal workers in the US, I think there's a much better examples that are more clearly exploitation.
Consider an employer that offers a job in exchange for sex from the worker. Or, worse, demands sex from the worker only after the job is being worked (to get around the clear transactional possibility in the first example).
Or, a related example - the employer offers work at a certain wage and the employee accepts. Then the employer refuses to pay the employee at all, while demanding the work be done - threatening to instead report the employee to the authorities.
To me, the exploitation of low wages is really only a small portion of what the concerns would be. It's that the employees are literally second class (non)-citizens and do not have the legal power or means to enforce any kind of fair negotiation.
This is true even in a situation where the country has no OSHA, FLSA, or other employer regulation. Even a country with completely libertarian employment should see a problem when some employees do not have any bargaining power at all. Even the act of trying to quit or reporting the employer for illegal activity can backfire against the employee, causing them to accept a situation that is worse than they would ever have agreed to in the first place. What's a migrant worker to do if their employer rapes them periodically, but they feel the alternative is being deported to worse conditions? Yes, technically they have an alternative and technically can make a decision about their preferences, but I think most people would agree that it's exploitative and wrong.
The exploitation in your example comes from the threat of reporting the worker, which is a threat of coercion by the state triggered by the employer. I have no problem describing that as exploitation. Similarly, giving a mugger money or paying ransom to a kidnapper is a transaction where you are better off by paying the money — but the transaction includes the mugging or kidnapping by which you are better off.
But your first paragraph does not seem to me to qualify.
In a country with completely libertarian employment there is no law against the worker working so the employer has no threat.
Potentially, but we also don't live in a society that's completely libertarian so I don't think that's a good counter to the argument that illegal workers are exploited.
If you were arguing that no worker should be illegal, you would be agreeing with your opponent in a significant way. They are arguing that the illegal workers should be deported, but the core argument is the same either way - illegal workers should not be hired. Your solution is simply to make them no longer illegal, instead of arguing that illegal workers are not actually exploited.
My reason has nothing to do with exploitation. It is his reason that struck me as puzzling, not the conclusion, which can be defended with a variety of other arguments.
I don't know that I agree with him in scope - if we imagine that an illegal immigrant accepts and works a job at $5 instead of the legal minimum wage, I would agree that's not exploitation.
My guess is that someone who is strongly in favor of minimum wages would see that as exploitation (unfair) a priori. But they may also believe that minimum wages should be set at a level that a person can support themselves and sometimes a family with no other income. Since neither you nor I agree, I'll put that perspective aside.
I do believe that there are wages that can be offered that would be unfair, and therefore exploitative. I've heard of farms where groups of illegal immigrants live in miserable conditions and absolutely terrible pay. It is my belief that this would not happen if coercion (meaning, to a level that is morally not okay, where it's no longer considered "fair") were not in play.
Of course, "fair" is not particularly well defined as a concept here, and there's a lot of room for everyone involved to disagree about where fairness starts and stops.
How can you tell that coercion is in play? The alternative is that they have no better alternatives and perhaps that the work would not be worth doing if they were paid more or housed better so nobody will offer them better alternatives.
Both of your replies are along the same lines so I'm going to respond here.
"Coercion" means persuading by force or threats. "Exploitation" means treating someone "unfairly" in order to benefit from their work.
Coercion already contains within its definition the idea that someone is persuaded (i.e. they on some level chose or made an affirmative agreement), but it's through force or threats. Exploitation brings in this idea of fairness, which as I said before is nebulous because everyone has a different idea of what "fair" means. Would you agree that someone who has been "coerced" into an agreement is being treated "unfairly"? Recognizing of course that we may still need to determine if someone actually has been coerced.
In regards to the person in the desert, there's no [direct] force and no [direct] threat, just a simple offer of life saving water in exchange for all of the dying man's material wealth. Some, maybe me - I'm at least partly undecided on this - would argue that the illegal immigrant and the man in the desert are under threat. The source of the threat is not the person offering them a deal, it's some outside party/force (the federal government and the desert). But, there's still a threat there, still some force that will compel their actions. Just because the person offering the trade isn't the one using the force doesn't mean it's not coerced through the existing threat.
Regardless of how that argument pans out, it seems to me the vast majority of people are going to agree that it's still "unfair" by almost any meaning of that word that an illegal immigrant feels the need to take jobs under conditions that they do not want and would not take otherwise. Even if they think that alternatives are even less fair (deportation, not being allowed to work at all), that doesn't make particularly low wages and bad working conditions fair. In fact, the lack of alternatives may be considered "unfair" on their own.
I feel like it's extremely difficult to argue that a person who remains in a location where they are repeatedly raped or have other crimes committed against them has been given a "fair" choice of options without coercion.
you evaded the question of Universal Basic Income the other day in Roatan. But UBI based on CREDITS not fiat / money / dollars / currency will supply plenty funds created by AI and robotization. Please acquaint your kinds selves to the CREATIVE SOCIETY for a rational solution to humanity not only US internal labor arrangements. Capish?
Not just illegal workers: legal workers under a visa that ties them to an employer face similar problems. That's one of the reasons I think such visas should be replaced by a system where the immigrant simply pays $X/year to the government in return for the right to reside and work in the country.
>Consider an employer that offers a job in exchange for sex from the worker. Or, worse, demands sex from the worker only after the job is being worked (to get around the clear transactional possibility in the first example).
Yes, that is worse, since it seems like a breach of contract, which includes a term (unstated but common knowledge) that sexual services are /not/ also required from the worker. So this is an easy case.
Your original case is more difficult for someone like me, who thinks that there is nothing wrong with sex work, any more than there is with (eg) accountancy. For, in that case, there would be nothing wrong with advertising for a sex-worker /who could do also your accounts/, and—what amounts to the same thing—advertising for an accountant /who could also provide sexual services. But such an advert would not get a favorable reception, since it would be deemed exploitative, even though it isn't.
In a society with balanced negotiations, the employee could choose to accept or decline the terms of the employment either at initial hire or when the terms changed. My point is that negotiations with people who are subject to deportation and other criminal sanctions are inherently unbalanced. The potential employee puts themselves at the mercy of the employer when they don't have the appropriate documentation to pass the I-9 form. The employer is supposed to refuse to hire them, but by doing them a "favor" of hiring them anyway, they create an obligation for the employee and also the terms by which they can blackmail that employee into accepting worse conditions.
I agree that in a balanced and libertarian society, an employer could offer a job of Accountant/Sex Worker and see what the going rate would be. Most likely that would be a very poor pairing that would either cost too much or result in poor work performance in one or both parts of the job. But it could be offered and then accepted or rejected as desired.
The reality is that requiring employees to provide sex under nebulous conditions is quite common. It can come with implied promises of promotions or pay increases, or from implied threats of termination or reporting for crimes (as with the illegal immigrants). Most people would refuse the offer, but the people on the margins may feel that it's the best option they have even when it's a bad option that most people in society seem to agree should not have been allowed to be offered.
I wasn't focusing so much on the risk of blackmail faced by people who are liable to be deported, and I agree that there is something amiss in that situation. I was more worried about the libertarian implication that offering a job as Accountant/Sex Worker is acceptable. In the end, I think it is, but that would be a world very different to ours.
I actually think that's pretty close to the world we already live in, at least prior to certain civil rights laws.
Real life is full of situations where someone was accused of "sleeping to the top" or whatever. Kamala Harris was accused of that even pretty recently (exactly how much she gained from sleeping with a powerful politician is up for debate, but that she slept with him at the same time he promoted her to important positions is not in question).
There are really good reasons that Accountant/Sex Worker positions don't actually exist, and rarely have in a formal sense. One, it causes dissention among the other employees. Obviously male employees who can't benefit, but also females who are not offered this option for whatever reason (not pretty, too old - stuff that's offensive to actually tell someone about why they weren't promoted). Two, as I mentioned above it's an inefficient situation. If you care about good accounting, hire a good accountant. If you care about good sex, seek that directly (many options). If you really want both from the same person, chances are you either give up some ability in one or both areas or pay a lot of money extra. Three, it's a really bad deal for most organizations, as only one person benefits from the sex side (the boss receiving the sex) while the rest of the organization only gets the accounting aspect. At a very small company, this may make some sense from an organizational perspective (i.e. the boss's perspective is nearly overlapping with the organization's perspective), but not for any larger company. Interestingly enough, it's not unusual for owners of very small companies to hire their wives to work an office position, which might be considered similar.
Agree with a lot of what you say here. Not sure it would be so difficult to fill such a position with an efficient candidate, since a man would only need (say) a qualified accountant who had a minimal amount of sexual experience and didn't really mind occasional sex with the boss. I'm sure there are such people.
So I don't know why the "sleeping to the top" idea didn't occur to me, which implies that there can be benefits in Accountant/Sex Worker for the potential employees, so that makes me worry less about such positions. And, true, offering such positions may have the practical disadvantages you mention. In principle, sex with the boss might be just another tedious aspect of the job that some people are prepared to do and others aren't, and that some people are better qualified than others for, but, no, it is not actually going to work that way, given the special sensitivities people actually have around sex.
That's how this hypothetical world of such jobs is importantly different from ours, I think.
You're exaggerating the problems and worrying too much.
Deportation is not some instantaneous operation. It takes time, and victims will use that time to report how they have been wronged.
Refusing to pay is theft, word will spread, the thieving employer will find fewer employees, and possibly some retribution and revenge. Sure it's not perfect, but there's also no such real world thing as completely libertarian employment, which presumably also relies strictly on reputational enforcement.
Kidnapping and rape are more criminal and abhorrent than merely refusing to pay for illegal work. At least some jurisdictions hold off deporting witnesses to such crimes.
These strike me as just more impossible hypothetical purity tests which don't really contribute to any real world situations.
I based my post on real life examples that have actually happened. Fear of being reported is extremely powerful, even if the end results would not be that bad. That's actually one of the major reasons that deportations take time and minimum wages as back pay is still due to illegal aliens (even when being deported) - to make it as easy and advantageous as possible to get out of such a bad situation.
There are still companies that either directly or indirectly (through hired supervisors) abuse and exploit the employees under these circumstances.
That depends a lot on specifics. Sometimes the employer is also the landlord and banker, in which case it's very hard to leave. Also, sometimes employees are not very smart and are overwhelmed by fear (often intentionally induced by the employer) and make poor decisions about their options.
My guess is that most people in these situations can and do just leave. But not everyone can or knows that they can.
Your real life examples do not include any "completely libertarian employment" examples because there are none. I have my doubts about any countries with no employer regulation too.
"This is true even in a situation where the country has no OSHA, FLSA, or other employer regulation. Even a country with completely libertarian employment should see a problem when some employees do not have any bargaining power at all."
My contrary take is that all the problems you mention are just more examples of governments causing problems, not solving them. Bureaucrats have little incentive to fix the problems which keep them employed.
A perhaps better example of what most people would consider voluntary exploitation: A relationship where one partner is both economically and emotionally dependent on the other, and the other partner is kind of a total jerk, who treats the first partner in ways bordering on abuse by normal standards.
For the sake of argument let us say that you know with 100% confidence that both people would still be worse of single, and they will not be able to hook up with other people.
If you had the ability to break up such a relationship, would you do it? And if you did, wouldn't that be very close to reporting a person employing illegal migrants under terrible working conditions?
Yes, this is a difficult type of case. We suppose that personal relationships should operate by different rules than impersonal relationships, eg hard bargaining as individuals is appropriate in business relationships but not in a marriage, which should involve shared deliberation as a team. But if one partner is much stronger and more independent than the other, then hard bargaining will imply that he—let's suppose its a "he", since that is the case that worries people, though it does not have to be—should get the lion's share of the benefits of the relationship, and she the squirrel's share, which is not much of a marriage, and may even be abusive. Thus, some notorious types from the "manosphere" argue that very high status males can reasonably expect sexual fidelity from their wives while at the same time having other women on the side. This seems like an ugly relationship to me, ripe to be called exploitation, but some women are prepared to accept the deal, and I am not sure that free-market types (like myself) can really object.
For what it is worth I know a couple with what I believe to be that arrangement and the wife does not appear in the least oppressed. My guess is that she doesn't want other partners, very much wants her husband, and does not see other relations as a threat. They have been married for a long time.
The perils of generalization. Speaking for myself, I would be never accept such an arrangement (gender-flipped) with my wife, and would be morally indignant if she suggested it. But I know other men do accept it, and you say the wife does, so it would be interesting to hear their own perspective on their relationships.
Let me try to sharpen the analogy a bit, since I think it actually adresses the psychology of being against 'exploiting immigrants'.
Let us say your sister is in a relationship with an abusive jerk. She prefers to be with him, even though she knows he is an abusive jerk. You find out that the jerk also has been doing some white collar crime, like tax evasion. You can report your brother-in-law to the police, he will probably go to prison for some years, which will give you a chance to break the relationship up permanently, but you will in the same move totally bankrupt your sister, who right now is living a decent life economically on her husband's money.
Do you report your abusive brother-in-law to the police?
I think a lot of free market types might actually be tempted to do so, and we can perhaps use this as an intuition pump for understanding the people who would deport illegal immigrants in order to protect them from abusive employers.
How do you punish masochists, by not punishing them?
A strong presumption of agency solves a lot of problems. There was some legal case on the Volokh Conspiracy of a couple somewhat like you describe, notorious for his abusive behavior when drunk, her repeated breakups and reunions, which went on for years, and then she accused him of rape. I don't see how any trial could ever prove rape in such a case unless she had move across the country to get away and he had followed her years later.
In another case, a husband drove his family off a cliff which somehow didn't go very far, they were all rescued relatively unharmed, but the wife screamed to the rescuers that her husband had tried to kill them all. Then later, she refused to cooperate with police, claimed it was all a misunderstanding. Without some dashcam video, how could you ever prove anything? While it's easy enough to say she gets what she deserves, what do you do with the kids?
Sometimes life just sucks and there's not much any legal system can do about it.
>any principal which implied that killing someone to harvest their organs is right would be a very bad approximation
I'm not really sure that's the case. Most people agree that upon committing certain acts (rape, murder etc.) you can lose freedom freedom, and in some places even your life. To take the most violent and unremorseful criminals and harvest their organs to save 5 of the most deserving people is not obviously abhorrent to me.
In terms of general moral principles:
When two parties, of equal moral standing, are negotiating a contract and one party is knowingly withholding information for their own advantage, they are exploiting the ignorant party.
When a trader has an effective monopoly on a plentiful, essential good/service, it is exploitative to charge a price which is an order of magnitude greater than the price he would charge in the face of competition.
I think these 2 principles summarize approximately how I feel about the scenarios presented, although I really struggle to quantify what price seems immoral. Saying a 'fair price' seems natural but it just raises the question, what is a fair price?
Even an order of magnitude would be acceptable in the 'dying of thirst' scenario. I'd certainly pay 10x the price and still be greatful in that situation.
"When two parties, of equal moral standing, are negotiating a contract and one party is knowingly withholding information for their own advantage, they are exploiting the ignorant party."
You are buying a house. You really like it, would pay the seller's asking price or even a little more if you had to. You don't tell the seller that, make a lower offer. That seems to fit your definition of exploitation, but it doesn't seem in the least wrong — any more than it is wrong for the seller who would, if necessary, accept a lower price to tell the buyer that. In such cases there is no presumption by either party that the other will tell him his true reservation price. I think something is missing from your definition.
Here is a different flavour of the same problem. Times are hard. The crops have just failed. A farmwife whose family is starving is made an offer. She can sell one of her daughters to the local brothel as a chattel-slave in exchange for enough money to feed all her family until their farm recovers and can start producing food again. This looks like a win all around. The brothel owner would prefer to have a new slave than the cash he bought her for. The family is better off for not starving to death. The brothel slave has the worst deal but it is still better than starving to death. The problem, as I see it, is that the institution of slavery is so vile that I will oppose any attempt to institute it, even if forbidding this sale means the family starves to death. I'm willing to die opposing it, to kill others opposing it, and to allow others to die opposing it.
I don't feel that strongly about people earning less than they could if they were in the country legally .... and could just take a different better paying job.
Not for the daughter, it seems, who is sold by /her mother/ into slavery. But free-market types will say that the individual has the right to decide /for themselves/ who to interact with, and therefore that they do /not/ have to endorse the outcome you describe.
But what if the mother decides to /sell herself/ into slavery, for the good of the family? It seems this will be a win all round (at least in terms of everyone's considered preferences, including the mother's), and the free-market types will have to endorse this outcome.
Do you think that slavery is so vile that this too should be stopped, even if the family starves to death? But is it any worse than, say, the father's finding the money they need by working himself to death in the newly opened silver mine?
The daughter is still better off having been sold into slavery than if she died of starvation. But yes, I think that slavery is so vile that she should be prevented from selling herself into slavery. And it is worse than 'father working himself to death at the newly opened silver mine' because father should have quit the mine and taken some other job instead. The wrongness here is ... why didn't he? And one of the many answers you do not want to get is 'because the only other jobs I am qualified to do are all being done by slaves'.
The real world case of defensible slavery is indentured servitude to pay the cost of immigration. A lot of immigrants in the early years were only able to get here by agreeing that when they landed the ship captain could auction them off. The winning bid was the one that offered to pay what they owed the captain for the shortest period of servitude.
Should that have been prevented?
For a different hard case consider a context, such as classical Greece, where the alternatives when one city won a war were to either kill the losers or enslave them. If you somehow had the power to prevent the slavery but not the killing, would you?
As it was practiced, yes, should have been prevented. The problem was not that the servant was able to contract their labour to pay for the cost of immigration, but that the labour laws should have prohibited certain behaviours. So, the servant should be able to pick their employers, and if they wanted to take a position where the work was more to their liking but paid their debt at a slower pace, then that should be allowed. They need to be allowed a certain amount of free time, which they could use to do, among other things, look for other employment.
And why do you think they didn't do it that way? It was a competitive market — multiple ships bringing people.
How would someone new to the country know enough about jobs and employers to make the choice on any grounds more elaborate than how short the period of indenture was?
The jobs were not all the same. You could already know if you wanted to work on a farm, vs as a maid in town, etc. Length of service was not the only thing that was significant to the indentured. But it is precisely because people couldn't investigate their positions before they took them that they needed the ability to sever their relationship with their master-employers if they found a better deal. And it is documented that many people took the offer under false promises -- they were promised a job doing as a house servant, but when they arrived they were sent to work the fields.
> For a different hard case consider a context, such as classical Greece, where the alternatives when one city won a war were to either kill the losers or enslave them. If you somehow had the power to prevent the slavery but not the killing, would you?
The issue arises once wars get started in order to acquire slaves.
Well, in the Greek case, polities did decide to go to war with the agreement ahead of time that the victor would do neither. Or, the losers were enslaved -- but could immediately buy themselves out of slavery. It seems more like the legal justification for war reparations rather than a real choice here. On occasion wealthy people would ransom entire populations of city-states that lost a war -- apparently for the prestige, though figuring out the real motives of the ancients is always difficult. It is clear that the ancients thought of slavery differently than we do today. When slaves were allowed to own property, marry, and indeed own their own slaves, you begin to see something that looks more like employment than bondage. But that's not the treatment the slaves in the silver mines received.
1. Were indentured servants actual slaves? Slaves could be killed, raped, etc, although I bet doing so in public would run afoul of various other laws.
2. My understanding of apprentices in "medieval" times, for some loose definition of "medieval", is that they too were bound to the master. Were they the same as indentured servants, slaves, ...?
3. How did classical Greeks differentiate winners and losers in a war? By accent, clothing, ...? How easy/hard was it for the losers to blend with the winners?
I have always had the impression that the primary reason slavery came to be associated with Africans was because skin color made such a natural marker, as opposed to different accents, clothing, etc. And it really went bonkers after Columbus because the new "empty" lands could absorb a lot more slaves than the few imported by the Arabs prior to Columbus. But I have no historical knowledge of this.
I doubt the indentured servant could be killed or raped, but don't know.
Apprentices were bound. I'm not sure what the penalties were for running away.
My guess is that the first generation slaves were distinguished by accent, their children not. I've seen no discussion of slaves pretending to be free. Those may have been small enough societies so that people knew which of their neighbors were citizens, which metics, which slaves.
Skin color would be a useful marker. I think you underestimate the scale of black slavery in al-Islam. There was at one point a slave revolt (Zanj) which held control of a substantial area for a while.
I did not know how extensive Arabian slavery was, and had never heard of the Zanj revolt. It makes me curious as to why more weren't sold to Europeans, and I can only guess that the climate, geography, and political structure were not conducive to slavery on that scale; but the Americas were, especially the tropical zones. I don't know enough about slavery to know why the climate matters that much, if it does, so maybe it's time to hunt down some books.
> I've seen no discussion of slaves pretending to be free.
Well Roman slave collars with tags that said "I've run away, my owner is so-and-so, reward of one solidus if recaptured" have been found.
Also at one point the Roman Senate was considering a law to require slaves to wear distinctive clothing. It was ultimately rejected lest the slaves should realize how many of them there were.
>The daughter is still better off having been sold into slavery than if she died of starvation
Yep, I take that point. So she could well have agreed to it herself. Still, I have my doubts about why selling herself into slavery is worse than her father's renting himself into a slow death at the silver mine. I don't quite understand your response:
>it is worse ... because father should have quit the mine and taken some other job instead
Doesn't the same apply to the daughter? That she should not have sold herself and taken some other job instead? I thought the example assumed that the family had no other options but to sell the daughter into sexual-slavery, or (I supposed) rent the father into a slow death. They both seem pretty bad to me, neither necessarily worse than the other, so that if it permissible for the father to choose death in the mine, it will be permissible for the daughter to choose slavery in the brothel. Or do you think that the death is not as vile?
The vile part is not having any other options for employment. If the institution of slavery did not exist, then the daughter could take a terrible job in a brothel, and her father could take a terrible job in a mine, but when something better came along they could quit and take the better job. A slave cannot. And slowly but surely, there are a class of low skill jobs that are all done by slaves because their owner can undercut the cost of the employed competition. It is rare for there to be an incentive to increase the productivity of slaves, to train them for better things and to make the job better because for them, because there isn't a constant competition for employees. The baumol effect doesn't apply either.
The institution of slavery is a cancer in the polity, one that has proven to be very difficult to remove.
Voluntary slavery is an oxymoron, and impossible to legally enforce without turning slavery into the default. But more to the point, a slave owner can offer just as much non-coercive inducement as any free employer, so the only benefit to slavery is the coercion, the morally repugnant urge to inflict harm and control other people, and since that reduces the work capability of the slave, it becomes the only reason for slavery.
>Voluntary slavery is an oxymoron, and impossible to legally enforce without turning slavery into the default
Don't see why it is an oxymoron, even if it is wrong. It /makes sense/ to say that people are self-owners, that owners can sell what they own to others, and therefore that a person can sell themselves to others, which is to become a slave. Still, some argue that self-ownership is inalienable, that, as a matter of fact, it is restricted in that you /may not/ sell yourself into slavery. What we need here is some argument why self-ownership differs in this respect from ownership of other things. You may well be right, however, about the complications about legalizing voluntary slavery.
>But more to the point, a slave owner can offer just as much non-coercive inducement as any free employer
I'm inclined to agree, in general, but, in the situation described, the family will eventually recover once the daughter earns enough money, and so the family will have an incentive to want her back, at a loss to the brothel owner, so that is one reason he might prefer to have her as a chattel-slave rather than a wage-slave. Sometimes its better to buy than to rent, and no need to assume any malicious desire to harm and control others.
To own means the right to control a rivalrous resource. Or more precisely - the right to exclude others. While you're alive it's impossible to relinquish control of your body, therefore it's impossible to transfer the ownership of your body to someone else, ergo voluntary slavery is impossible.
>While you're alive it's impossible to relinquish control of your body
Not sure this is true in the relevant sense. True, I have direct control over the motions of my body (just like slaves do). But it is possible for me to always take orders from another person about what I do with my body, and that means they also have control (albeit indirect) over my (again, just like a slave). Of course, I don't ordinarily grant others such control, but I could, and, if I did—if the use of my body was completely at the discretion of another person—then I would have alienated myself into slavery
>if I own, I'm must have the right to sell, and if I can sell, I must own" fallacy
I grant that there are conceptions of ownership under which owning something does not imply the right to sell it on, and so, I agree, it is invalid to /draw an inference from/ ownership to the right to sell. But still, for a wide range of things, the right to transfer is one of the incidents of ownership, so, in my view, there is a /presumption/ that this applies also applies to self-ownership. It might be a mistaken presumption, but that needs to be argued, as I stated elsewhere in my comments.
Thanks. That looks quite interesting, and, having now given it a quick look, it /does/ draw an important distinction between ownership of self and ownership of externals, and (plausibly, in my view) grounds the former on the intimate relation we have to our bodies. The author rejects the idea that we appropriate our own bodies, which does seem odd. Problem, however—with respect to my mother, my body is an external, and so, since she created me de novo (ignoring the father's contribution), she owned me right from the start, and since ownership /of externals/ typically comes with absence of term, she owns me until she decides to free me. It seems that the default libertarian view has to be that /my mother/ owns me, not me.
I answered more fully above, but it comes down to slavery being uncontestable by the slave, since they are just property like dogs or furniture. You could kidnap someone, gin up a fake contract, with fake signature, real fingerprints, retina scans, and DNA, and even if the slave could interest someone else in contesting the contract, it can't be disproved. In the family example, suppose the daughter (or mother) was kidnapped and made to appear as a slave, unless the kidnapping itself can be proven, it's going to come down to a signed contract vs a family whose every incentive is to lie.
In effect, every human is susceptible to being turned into an irrevocable slave, without any practical recourse.
Even if you establish some kind of 90% slavery, the problem remains. How can you tell a real slave who has seller's remorse from a fake slave who wants his legitimate freedom back?
As I say, you may well be right about the complications about legalizing voluntary slavery, so that, even if it were morally permissible to sell oneself into slavery, it should still be illegal to do so, perhaps because of the risks you mention. I don't really have a strong view on that, one way or the other, and was focusing mostly on the morality (or otherwise) of it.
My objection to legal slavery is that it is an oxymoron, another one of those impossible libertarian purity tests. There is no way to make voluntary slavery legal without allowing criminals to falsely declare someone a slave and making it impossible to disprove.
* No contract signature is valid, since the slave only has to alter his repentant signature to undo the contract.
* Fingerprints, retina scans, DNA repositories, and other personal proofs can be submitted without the slave's consent.
* A slave can no more contest his slavery than a dog or table or any other property. That is the meaning of slave: no rights.
* Family and friends are far too biased to be reliable witnesses to prove the negative that the slave did not sign the contract.
Voluntary slavery turns the default condition of mankind into slavery. Since a slave owner can offer all the same inducements to work as any free employer, the only advantage a slave owner has is coercion, and since that reduces a slave's value, the only benefit to a slave owner is masochism and control freakery.
"There is no way to make voluntary slavery legal without allowing criminals to falsely declare someone a slave and making it impossible to disprove."
Doesn't that argument apply to selling anything? It should be illegal to sell land because someone could use a fraudulent deed to pretend it had been sold to him.
It is pretty easy to imagine legal rules that would make it hard to claim someone had sold himself to you if he hadn't, just as we have legal rules to do the same thing for land.
Someone claimed to be a slave can argue on his own behalf to any court that is not certain the claim is true. I don't see why you assume that everyone takes the claim as true and acts accordingly.
A related reply is that if slavery is legal and common, there will be two types of slave: docile and uppity. The uppity ones scare people into worrying about slave revolts. Anyone hearing a slave yelling he is a kidnapped free man is going to think about slave revolts before he thinks of coming to the aid of a possible but rare kidnapped free man.
Any hearings on the possibility would have to be rare too, otherwise every slave owner could spend half the day in court defending his ownership. There have to be some real and expensive costs associated with all accusations, not just false ones.
I just don't see any way to make voluntary slavery legal and common without opening the flood gates to kidnapped false slaves. I believe slavery only survived in antiquity because slaves were foreigners captured in battle or had some other distinctive traits, and were involuntary.
In theory, sure. But in practice, the owner can cut out his tongue. The owner can also threaten whipping his slave if anyone contests his ownership; how many people would be willing to cause such pain without knowing the slave personally? Yes, the owner damages his property, but the alternative is losing the property and going to jail or becoming a slave too. The slave can't contest his contract signature except by signing something , and his incentive is to sign differently. DNA, fingerprints, and retina scans can be copied.
In practice, I don't see how any slave can protest his condition any better than a dog can. It takes outside parties with independent proof, and those are the kind of people who kidnappers will avoid.
Would it be possible to take on a debt with your vital organs as security? If we allow selling organs, we could possibly also use them as a guarantee for a loan.
In that case you would probably be a slave to the person with a deed to a pound of flesh from your heart.
In many historical periods debt slaves was treated pretty much like captured slaves.
The only vital organs I could imagine are a kidney and lung. If there are other paired organs, them too. I have heard that livers can be cut in half and continue to function well enough, possible regrow to full size. But a pound of heart is meaningless, like being half pregnant.
I think a heart is worth more than a kidney on the grey market, but we really don't have to actually sell it. The question is, if one person owned the right to remove the lungs of another person any time he liked, how would that be different from slavery?
Alternatively, let us say that it is illegal to sell your organs (except kidneys), but you can still take on personal debt. In that case, what powers would a creditor have over a debtor? Can he confiscate the debtors house and car? Can he confiscate all the debtor's clothes? Can he take the debtor's food and any money the debtor ever makes? Do you operate with debtor's prisons?
The way you legislate the relationship between creditor and debtor will determine whether a society can or cannot have voluntary slavery. Most modern countries have explicit laws protecting people so you are allowed to earn money and live even if you owe a gajillion dollars to somebody else, but as soon as you earn anything over a the minimum required to live, you can be forced to pay.
My point is only that if a legal system allow a creditor to confiscate any of a debitor's possesions, including food, shelter, clothes (and possibly organs) then you can have legal debt slavery.
That is my inclination. But consider the strong version of the water in the desert hypothetical which I described in the text I linked to. His price is everything you own and three-quarters of your income for the next forty years. Is there anything wrong with that? If you were the one agreeing to those terms would you consider yourself morally bound to adhere to them?
I think that counts as duress, even though the other party is not responsible for putting him in the desert. He is signing a contract with the equivalent of a gun to his head. Weaker versions, like I am hungry so I am paying $100 for a sandwich at the only gas station within 100 miles, are not duress. I don't have a principled way of deciding how extreme the situation has to be to count as duress.
But then any contract for something very important to you counts as under duress, including most marriages. I think the point of not enforcing contracts under duress is that the person you are contracting with has imposed the duress, which in this case he has not.
I wouldn't go that far. If your BATNA is an agonizing death, you are under duress. If your BATNA is finding some other girl to date, you are not under duress. If an unrelated third party holds gun to your head while you sign the contract, it's duress, even though none of the signatories is responsible for imposing the duress.
Wouldn't that be "duress" in the purest sense? Even if we accept such a solution for the sake of the person's life, we could still agree that it was exploitative.
I square this circle somewhat by agreeing that some exploitation is acceptable, and some exploitation is actually desirable. Indentured servants coming to the US were definitely exploited in most senses of that word, but seemed to be more than okay with that on balance of their lives.
On the other hand, actual slaves were also exploited, but at least contemporary people don't consider that to be okay in any sense.
If there's any sense in using the word "exploitation" to describe a work situation, that seems like the prime example. The word means to treat someone unfairly. In practice many of the indentured servants died before finishing their service. All lived in harsh conditions. All only joined up for lack of other options (anyone who could have chosen a different option certainly would have).
Perhaps that's a distinction to look at for your original question. If someone had a free choice, would they ever choose that trade? No one would ever willingly trade their house for a drink of water, and knowing the relative difficulty of getting those two items we can infer that for approximately 100% of all cases. To me, that sounds like a form of duress. How to draw the line between "duress" and "normal economic considerations" does seem like quite a challenge still. I agree with you that Walmart should be able to charge more for water in the wake of a hurricane, even though that's still duress. But again, I'm morally comfortable with saying that some levels of exploitation is acceptable, so I'm not too bothered by this distinction.
How do you know that many lived in harsh conditions and died before finishing their service? They had another option — not coming to America — since they could not afford the trip except on those terms.
No one would trade his house for water unless he was lost in the desert and the water would save his life — but this person is lost in the desert. Nobody would work for $20/hour if he could get the same job at $30. What's the difference? Why are circumstances not relevant to what is a fair trade?
I'm a simple person, and that is exactly my position.
In addition, the hypotheticals bother me precisely because they are so impossible. I understand the use of impossible hypotheticals, but they don't tell me anything about the real world or people's real principles. They are like dividing by zero; interesting in various ways, but useless for real people in the real world.
There are two libertarian impossible hypotheticals I am familiar with.
A burglar throws you out of your tenth floor apartment, you save yourself by grabbing onto the ninth floor balcony, and the ninth floor occupant tells you to stop trespassing; do you let go?
A comet is heading towards Earth and the only thing which can save all humanity is a rocket which, alas, is broken for lack of a 25 cent part whose owner refuses to sell; do you steal it?
They don't educate me at all whichever way they are answered. This glass of water for a house hypothetical is just as meaningless.
The baseball card scenario isn't a whole lot better. While people do occasionally make the news for finding valuable paintings or antiques, the only real lesson is that the seller is not very good at his business. If it's fraud to not tell him of the trading card's real value, is it fraud to not go through all his other wares and evaluate them? Is it fraud to not hire experts for all his other wares to get proper evaluations? Is it fraud to not spend all your spare time investigating everyone else selling baseball cards to see what they are undervaluing?
No. Exploitation requires fraud. If the antique dealer recognizes you as an expert when you walk in before you've seen his cards, and asks your opinion but refuses to pay for your appraisal, feel free to buy it for a dollar and sell it for a million. If he pays for your opinion, or you offer it for free, and you lie, there's the exploitation.
Interesting evolution of memes. Your first one is modified from Bill Bradford's hypothetical, adding the burglar and replacing the flagpole with the balcony. The second is mine from _Machinery_ plus a little more detail.
The point of these is to push you to think about whether your principles are as absolute as libertarians like to claim. If someone supports taxation because he believes that without it there would be catastrophic failure, is "taxation is theft and theft is always wrong" an adequate argument? If, in the hypotheticals where a rights violation produces an enormous benefit, you would be willing to do it, then it isn't adequate. You need to deal with his reasons for believing that without taxation there would be a catastrophic collapse.
I'm not surprised at borrowing yours, since you've written a lot of good books. I think the only stance I may never understand is protection rackets. I'll have to go back and see how I changed yours. The balcony/flagpole one I would have thought to be from you too, so no idea how my memory mangled it.
I do understand the purpose of the hypotheticals, but some of them seem so impossible or contrived that it's hard to take them seriously. The trolley problem is not quite as bad as the balcony/flagpole and rocket part; it seems actually plausible, and easy to modify to be even more plausible.
For instance, I live in the boonies near a small town with unmarked roads (two lanes, but no shoulder markings, centerline, crosswalks, etc), and always edge away from dog walkers because few use leashes and dogs are unpredictable. I edge away so I can stop watching them in favor of watching for oncoming traffic, and always wonder what I'd do if said oncoming traffic were coming too fast to avoid me, and my only option of avoiding it would be to aim for the shoulder and hope the dog and walker were alerted by the noise of the oncoming speeder and jumped for the bushes. But that assumes a lot, and they are far more likely to be seriously hurt for not reacting instantly than any car crash at 20-30 mph. Would it be better to veer away from the dog walker and go for a head-on collision, to avoid spinning into the dog walker, and hope that a straight head-on would harm both cars' occupants less than spinning? Would it be better to try to come as close as possible to the walker and hope the other driver tries to hug his shoulder? Would it be better to slam on the brakes and lose all mobility and ability to steer clear?
Luckily, in 25 years here, none of this has ever even come close to a reality, but it does always make me think of the trolley problem when I pass a walker on the shoulder.
You probably did. I just checked my eBook version of Mechanics, and can't find "rocket" or "comet". But it's an odd version, whose ToC is just chapter numbers, no names, so who knows where I got it from.
(Interesting point. If it shows out that you are not an American my reply below will sound pretty dumb)
I generally believe the very smooth american style libertarianism where all counter arguments sound unrealistic is an effect of not having had war on your own soil since the 1860's.
A lot of hypotheticals actually popped up during the last world war and had to be delt with:
1: You have a formally neutral country (Vichy France, Portugal) which is holding on to strategically important land. Can you invade them if you are a libertarian?
2: You are in a neutral country that is pressured into selling war material to Germany (Denmark). Are you allowed to blow up a privately owned factory?
3: Illegal Jewish refugees wants to help to get to a country without German presence. Can you steal a boat to help them? If you are a captain of a privately owned ship, can you let them stow away in it without telling the owner of the ship or the rest of the crew?
4: You believe a normal private person is feeding information to the police about the former two activities, but you don't have any real evidence. Are you allowed to shoot him? Or perhaps blow his house up to send a message?
(Notice again, all of this is happening inside a 'formally neutral' country).
I know these four questions don't have anything to do with the question at hand, but I think if you want to fully hold on to a philosophical stand point you need to face the hardest questions relating to it.
To the first three, YES, absent other factors such as the boat owner and his family being executed by the occupying force. The fourth, no, because of the doubt, although the degree of doubt may play a role.
I look at them as balancing harm. Is the harm you do less than the potential or actual harm it would mitigate? It's the same with the 25 cent rocket part and the balcony trespasser. The glass of water in the dessert is just silly, trying to imagine how such a scenario could even arise as stated.
Most political screeds get bogged down in such minutia that I try to avoid them. I think I'd describe myself as wanting to follow ideological purity until it twists itself in knots over balconies and rocket ship parts, then I punt to pragmatism to avoid the headaches over angels on pinheads.
At a considerable tangent, the angels on pinheads was not actually an absurd argument. The point was to think about whether an angel had only location or also took up space. If that seems a silly question because you don't believe in angels, consider the distinction more generally. You can't fit two people in the same place but an unlimited number of people's thoughts can be on that place. That was also the answer for angels, not that three or four could fit but that an unlimited number could.
My answer was incomplete. There's more to it than that.
I think "Rule of Law" is a figment of lawyers' imagination, a fig leaf to cover up the naughty "Rule by Men" which they'd rather pretend doesn't exist. Laws are interpreted by Men, and nothing shows that more than an Appeals Court first reversing a trial court 2-1, then affirming it en banc 8-7, and the Supreme Court making its own 5-4 decision.
Why do courts eliminate the ten kilos of heroin found in a car as evidence, instead of allowing it but prosecuting the cops for their illegal search? — Because prosecuting cops is bad karma, and government employees look out for each other.
So they have to add to that fig leaf with a lot of quibbly rules which drift further and further from any objective Rule of Law which could actually be understood by the poor schmucks who are supposed to understand and obey, more or less instantly, what courts take years to not decide in the form of split decisions.
Thus once ideological purity runs into the quibbly realm of flagpoles and trespassing and angels on pinheads, my sense of justice lifts that fig leaf and falls back on those utilitarian comparisons.
I don't think I'm describing that very well. My substack is full of similar less-than-articulate ramblings which I'm trying to condense down to a single book-length screed. It has helped me consolidate my thoughts, and my only real audience is myself. It's only taken 15 years so far. Maybe I'll have a clearer answer in another 15.
Interesting. So you do believe you are allowed to disregard other peoples' property rights if there is a clear and big benefit to humanity from doing so.
What do you think about the current discussion about PEPFAR? Should the US government be allowed to force taxpayers to pay for AIDS medicine to third world countries?
All four are somewhat trick questions with so many variables that any number of answers are valid. You are obviously referring to WW II, and trying to overlay a libertarian government on top of any of the participants is a hopeless task. Would any libertarian government have even been able to join the war? For instance, I believe the US has zero need for any military. The idea of a coastal invasion is laughable. The idea of Canada or Mexico invading militarily is laughable. A libertarian government would enable an armed society making the current society look unarmed by comparison.
So here are more serious answers.
1: Unanswerable, because a libertarian government would never be in the position of making such a decision.
2. No libertarian government can force private companies to sell anything to anybody.
3. Same as before; I would base it on whether stealing the boat would lead to more harm for the boat owner than the refugees, or I would try to buy it, rent it, or make it look like the Nazis had stolen it. There are too many variables for any better answer.
4. The level of proof would have to be very high for me to consider killing someone to protect others.
ETA: As for PEPFAR, that question doesn't apply to a libertarian government.
I was originally thinking about what a person who believed in libertarianism would do in those circumstances (here libertarianism is the philosophical belief that you should respect other people's right to property and bodily autonomy except when they themselves refuse to respect other people's rights to the same).
I have a great grandfather who had to face some of the latter questions, and wrote a book about the implications.
But it might also be interesting to look at it from a purely societal perspective. Let us grant the following:
1) All countries in the world have abolished their armies, their police and have stopped taxing the population.
2) There still exist some kind of Icelandic saga era legal system which protects people's personal rights, possibly only using the threat of outlawry.
3) Somehow there still exist a global economy with long supply chains.
Even in such a world, you would still have groups like the nazis! They might just not be able to declare themselves leaders of a country, but imagine what an organization of a few hundred thousand brown shirts with guns could get away with, particularly if all other gun owners are unable to coordinate into big groups.
Let us say that in our world there comes into being a paramilitary group called 'the Virtous Righthanders'. They have three primary goals:
-To protect other citizens from crime.
-To remove thrash from public spaces.
-To cut the left hand of all left handed people! Sieg Rechts!
Occasionally an individual Righthander might get outlawed on the thing, but he will always be able to hide with other members of his movement. Usually other people are too scared of the movement to try to bring charges against them.
Some lefthanded people figure out what companies the Righthanders are buying their weapons from. Then they find the factory that is providing the tools that the weapon manufacturers are using. This is tools which are also used by a lot of other companies, but they are the best place to shut down the supply chain and stop the Righthanders access to weapons.
Are the left handed resistance movement allowed to blow up the privately owned tool factory?
(Also, I don't quite get why PEPFAR doesn't apply to a libertarian government?)
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet in the other comments:
Economic predictions often rely on a variety of assumptions—some implicit, others explicit—such as that people are rational, possess all necessary information, can always choose to refuse a trade, and are free from legal constraints. It is partly on the basis of these assumptions that economists conclude that freedom of association maximizes welfare.
A voluntary trade between two parties can be considered exploitation if:
1. There is a significant discrepancy in how well these assumptions hold for each party, clearly favoring one over the other.
2. The disadvantaged party would likely not accept the trade if their disadvantages were remedied.
3. The advantaged party is aware of this and does nothing to rectify the imbalance.
Exploitation is problematic because, absent the usual economic assumptions, there is no compelling reason to believe that these voluntary trades maximize welfare compared to alternative arrangements.
I do not actually know if this explanation of exploitation holds up under scrutiny, but I think it reflects the implicit models in your interlocutor's mind, and it does not seem unreasonable.
For the rare trading card, the assumptions that do not hold well are information availability and perhaps market access. For the water in the desert, it is the impossibility to refuse the trade on pain of death. For the Mexican immigrants, it is the legal constraints under which they operate.
I suspect their opinion about why they support deporting "exploited" immigrants is not because they care about the well being of the immigrants, indeed they acknowledge that they'd be worse off in their home country. Instead I think what they might care about is punishing the alleged exploiter, because they don't like his behavior. Depriving him of people to exploit, i suppose, being the full extent of the punishment. Perhaps they simply want to find ways of not rewarding exploitative behavior. It might also be a cognitive dissonance attempt to justify beliefs they are too ashamed of to say out loud.
There is indeed a stable equilibrium in which everyone commits to never accepting less than half the gains, but it's not the only possible one. If everyone committed to never accepting less than 90% of the gains, then no one will ever get anything; but in that case anyone who instead only commits to never accepting less than 10% of the gains does really well by it (as 10% is a lot better than nothing.) The equilibrium here is reached when half of people have a commitment to accepting no less than 90%, and the other half have a commitment to accepting no less than 10%. (This is an equilibrium because were it not half-and-half, there will be those who are unable to find deal partners (if the majority is 90%ers), and thus would have been better off with the opposite commitment; or (if the majority is 10%ers) could switch to the opposite and get more out of each transaction.)
This seems like a good example of what might be meant by "exploitation"—a world in this 90%-10% equilibrium is one which could fairly be described as half the people (those committed to receiving no less than 90%) exploiting the other half.
That is not an equilibrium. Someone who switches from 10 to 90 gets nine times as much half as often. You need to have most of the people committed to 90 to make it an equilibrium.
Yeah, I see what you mean. My bad, you're right, the equilibrium point here isn't half-and-half.
But there are other equilibria than everyone committing to accept no less than half, right? And that seems to cut at what people mean by "exploitation", while still consisting only of people doing purely positive-sum interactions. If you're committed to taking no less than 90%, and I grit my teeth and accept 10% rather than nothing, I both have benefited from our interaction and yet it seems not too unreasonable for me to feel hard done by in the manner that the word "exploitation" seems to capture.
On the other hand, changes in the initial property rights setup can change positive sum interactions into negative sum ones, and vice versa. Someone who threatens to smash up my car unless I pay him cash equal to half the car's value to me (or 90%, or 10%, or any other amount) is wronging me, but someone who will give me his car (which would otherwise be destroyed, for some reason) for half the car's value to me (or 10%, or 90%) is not at all wronging me (even if no further negotiation on price is possible, take it or leave it). In both scenarios I can choose to have a car, and pay a fraction of its value to me, or not have a car and keep my cash.
So it's clear the ultimatum structure alone does not determine if the offerer is in the wrong, no matter the offer.
David, how does the quality and quantity of market information possessed by the person, whom we analyzing to determine if they were exploited, factor into this? I think you would agree that a person not being "of sound mind" would be an easy mark for exploitation, but what if they are of sound mind but simply the lack of intelligence or the ability to understand how to maximize their personal utility? How would that factor into your calculation of exploitation?
We pay for insurance because we fear potential future losses and we want to reduce the exposure to those losses and are willing to pay a present price to do so. The more likely and more severe we believe those future losses to be, the more we would be willing to pay for insurance to mitigate them. So, when fearing one's imminent demise (or that of those we care about) a person would likely pay a very high price to avert that scenario.
When a person is lost in the desert, in a forest, or in a park near their home, they may reasonably, or unreasonably, have an extreme fear for their life and be willing to exchange anything and everything they have rights to in order to alleviate this fear. Would it be exploitive to offer to escort this person to safety for everything they own? What if, unbeknownst to them, they were on the verge of making to safety without any assistance, but they did not know that-- information asymmetry? What if you understood that technology has enabled the mass misleading of people and manipulation of them to make personal utility choices that are deeply subobtimal--would you see anything wrong with that?
Through these questions I am trying to make a case that there may be times when governmental regulation to prevent exploitation, such as price gouging, may be warranted. Please note that I qualified this with "there may be times" because I do believe that there are also times where, what we think of as price gouging is warranted and results in the more efficient allocation of resources.
I think it is wrong to exploit someone's ignorance but, unless you have deliberately misled them, not the sort of wrong that should be corrected by force. I can imagine someone who knows he is in that sort of position adopting, or being advised to adopt, a commitment to always making the deal conditional on the other person not having knowledge that makes the deal obviously a bad one.
But not permitting the deal seems like a violation of the person who is agreeing to it.
I could clarify that 'it is only withholding information which the ignorant party would expect you to divulge that is immoral/exploitative'...but I suspect there would still be a counterexample which I would concede.
I wouldn't be upset if I learned that my morality couldn't be classified to infinite precision in finite words. At least I'm not dogmatic.
When the word illegal workers or illegal immigrants is printed or broadcasted, the general public in America relates the profile to Mexican and Central Americans, including some that unbeknownst to the public are already American citizens and residents with green cards in their wallets and purses.
Two, stateside who is being exploited is the taxpayer´s money used to wake the woke and fund the entitlements of majorities posing as minorities.
I think the water in the desert issue comes down to a conflict between two different moral intuitions: exploitation and minimum obligations to other humans in need. The exploitation aspect is the salient aspect because we think about that a lot, but the obligations aspect is the one doing the work, we just don't think about such things much.
Consider the slight difference in the desert example: the guy doesn't need a drink of water, he needs $10,000 dollars to pay off his bookie so he can stop hiding in the desert and return home. It doesn't seem like many people would say "absolutely, it would be wrong not to give it to him" like they do with the water example. Yet if he just needed 5$ it does start to seem kind of shameful to not toss him a fiver to get him out of trouble.
If the fellow in the desert doesn't need a glass of water, but instead needs a blood transfusion, or a $10,000 air lift out of the desert that you have to pay for, suddenly asking for his house as payment seems more reasonable.
If it starts to matter a lot how much the amount of aid is it seems to me that the important aspect isn't exploitation but violating basic norms of helping people a little if you can and they need it. This is the same stuff that hospitality requirements are made of, or other, general "failure to do good" type expectations. While we might not be willing to punish people in every case, we generally blame them and think less of them for not doing a small and easily achievable bit of good. We don't generally today have clear rules and expectations for these things so we don't think of them in our (relatively) flat considerations of ethics, but they are important, and seem to have been more important in the past, presumably because people lived a little closer to the edge.
I agree. I think part of the system of norms I am familiar with is that you help strangers if doing so is no trouble, tell them where the restroom is and the like. An hour or two ago I asked someone in the airport where I could get a hot chocolate and he pointed me at a Starbucks. But violating those norms isn't exploitation, it just marks you as someone not worth cooperating with short of an explicit agreement, lowers your status but doesn't make you liable to punishment.
Indeed, the bathroom and coffee shop directions are good examples. It is interesting to me that many philosophers, modern ones anyway, seem to struggle a bit with that blameworthy tier of bad behavior. That some behavior should mark someone as an asshole who people dislike but not leave them liable for punishment is a big part of Smith’s theory, but moderns seem to want to categorize everything as perfectly fine or punishable. I find myself wondering why that is, what happened that the concepts of right and wrong got flattened down so much.
I think even if you have a problem with "exploitation", the solution to the problem of someone finding a man lost in the desert and dying of thirst and selling him water for the deed to his house isn't to ban water!
Yes, but in the end libertarians often take that to be the same thing. If you make it known that such agreements will not be enforced, then it reduces the incentive to give the guy the water. It also can make it hard to find a reasonable level that society will enforce. Is $100 okay for a glass of water? How about $1,000? At some arbitrary and nebulous point, society may decide not to enforce the contract, making it less likely that future deals will be made no matter how necessary.
I took the scenario to be a one-off incident where the only incentive that should be needed is that you don't want to be responsible for the guy's death. I'm sure intuitions would be different if we were talking about installing water fountains in the desert and charging for their use.
A libertarian might wonder why there is only one water supplier. Surely if one random water supplier can find the guy lost in the desert, so can others, and competition will bring the price down to its natural level, presumably much closer to cost.
That's just another problem with these artificial purity test questions. They set up such bizarre situations that specifically preclude real answers.
Well, the case is devised to force us to evaluate the specific moral valance that is in question. If this was a street corner in New York, your answer would be obvious - someone would sell water for less. But being in a desert makes it sound remote, and the fact that you meet this dying man is a pure coincidence that offers this man an option that moments before was not an option. He was going to die without you, and now that you are there it's possible for another option to be on the table.
That's why David used that example, offering the water at any price is strictly better than the current situation. At worst he can still reject the offer and die, which is no worse than the existing situation.
My dislike is based on making up such artificial situations with such strange constraints that no answers have any basis in reality. Like Shakespeare's pound of flesh, or the similar pound of heart in these comments -- we base our answers on our experiences, and expecting meaningful answers from nonsensical impossible scenarios is itself a waste of time.
See my comment on the trolley problem as being at least plausible and relatable to a real life example. No one wanders the desert with an extra glass of water. You may as well ask what would happen if you played four in a row on a 3x3 tic-tac-toe game.
I partly agree. I do have concerns about pushing hypotheticals too far, and agree entirely that intuition pump scenarios should be viewed skeptically.
In this specific example, it's not impossible to imagine that something like this has happened in real life. Someone goes walking through the desert and comes across another person who ran out of water. Expanding this beyond the exact details of the scenario risks adding a lot of unspoken confounders, so I would be very hesitant to say something like "and therefore store owners shouldn't be allowed to raise prices during an emergency" which is where some people would take this train of thought.
Great post! Thank you. As for the issue of paying a lower price for illegal immigrants’ work, this issue goes away in a free market as employers bid up prices until they achieve equilibrium with all wages (“Free to Choose”).
As for the guy dying of thirst, this falls outside of civilization so it’s a lifeboat problem, which eliminates the domain necessary for morality to exist (i.e., civilization). But as described it is still a trade between the two men (the dying man can always choose death). Civilization is the precondition for questions of morality. The premise that an individual isn’t free trade his labor at the market price because that individual isn’t free to associate with Americans or isn’t free to operate his body at the invitation of an American businessman on private property is in contradiction to the concept of a moral civil society.
> His argument was that they were being exploited by being paid less than other workers, that that was bad and they should be expelled to prevent it.
This is a bit like saying the patient must be killed so a doctor does not profit from his illness.
Why not propose that remove any work related restrictions on illegal immigrants so they do not have to work for lower wages at all ? That serves dual purpose. It protects US citizens from unfair(!) competition, reduces illegal immigration of people who have not unique skill other than working for very low wages and also prevents employers from unfairly profiting. Also saves government money to maintain massive staff to do work permits and labor market socialism and expenses on deportation.
For all I know he would have supported that. The question was whether, given the existence of the laws that make the immigrant illegal, he should be deported.
"The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism." Joan Robinson
In terms of illegal workers in the US, I think there's a much better examples that are more clearly exploitation.
Consider an employer that offers a job in exchange for sex from the worker. Or, worse, demands sex from the worker only after the job is being worked (to get around the clear transactional possibility in the first example).
Or, a related example - the employer offers work at a certain wage and the employee accepts. Then the employer refuses to pay the employee at all, while demanding the work be done - threatening to instead report the employee to the authorities.
To me, the exploitation of low wages is really only a small portion of what the concerns would be. It's that the employees are literally second class (non)-citizens and do not have the legal power or means to enforce any kind of fair negotiation.
This is true even in a situation where the country has no OSHA, FLSA, or other employer regulation. Even a country with completely libertarian employment should see a problem when some employees do not have any bargaining power at all. Even the act of trying to quit or reporting the employer for illegal activity can backfire against the employee, causing them to accept a situation that is worse than they would ever have agreed to in the first place. What's a migrant worker to do if their employer rapes them periodically, but they feel the alternative is being deported to worse conditions? Yes, technically they have an alternative and technically can make a decision about their preferences, but I think most people would agree that it's exploitative and wrong.
The exploitation in your example comes from the threat of reporting the worker, which is a threat of coercion by the state triggered by the employer. I have no problem describing that as exploitation. Similarly, giving a mugger money or paying ransom to a kidnapper is a transaction where you are better off by paying the money — but the transaction includes the mugging or kidnapping by which you are better off.
But your first paragraph does not seem to me to qualify.
In a country with completely libertarian employment there is no law against the worker working so the employer has no threat.
Potentially, but we also don't live in a society that's completely libertarian so I don't think that's a good counter to the argument that illegal workers are exploited.
If you were arguing that no worker should be illegal, you would be agreeing with your opponent in a significant way. They are arguing that the illegal workers should be deported, but the core argument is the same either way - illegal workers should not be hired. Your solution is simply to make them no longer illegal, instead of arguing that illegal workers are not actually exploited.
My reason has nothing to do with exploitation. It is his reason that struck me as puzzling, not the conclusion, which can be defended with a variety of other arguments.
I don't know that I agree with him in scope - if we imagine that an illegal immigrant accepts and works a job at $5 instead of the legal minimum wage, I would agree that's not exploitation.
My guess is that someone who is strongly in favor of minimum wages would see that as exploitation (unfair) a priori. But they may also believe that minimum wages should be set at a level that a person can support themselves and sometimes a family with no other income. Since neither you nor I agree, I'll put that perspective aside.
I do believe that there are wages that can be offered that would be unfair, and therefore exploitative. I've heard of farms where groups of illegal immigrants live in miserable conditions and absolutely terrible pay. It is my belief that this would not happen if coercion (meaning, to a level that is morally not okay, where it's no longer considered "fair") were not in play.
Of course, "fair" is not particularly well defined as a concept here, and there's a lot of room for everyone involved to disagree about where fairness starts and stops.
How can you tell that coercion is in play? The alternative is that they have no better alternatives and perhaps that the work would not be worth doing if they were paid more or housed better so nobody will offer them better alternatives.
Both of your replies are along the same lines so I'm going to respond here.
"Coercion" means persuading by force or threats. "Exploitation" means treating someone "unfairly" in order to benefit from their work.
Coercion already contains within its definition the idea that someone is persuaded (i.e. they on some level chose or made an affirmative agreement), but it's through force or threats. Exploitation brings in this idea of fairness, which as I said before is nebulous because everyone has a different idea of what "fair" means. Would you agree that someone who has been "coerced" into an agreement is being treated "unfairly"? Recognizing of course that we may still need to determine if someone actually has been coerced.
In regards to the person in the desert, there's no [direct] force and no [direct] threat, just a simple offer of life saving water in exchange for all of the dying man's material wealth. Some, maybe me - I'm at least partly undecided on this - would argue that the illegal immigrant and the man in the desert are under threat. The source of the threat is not the person offering them a deal, it's some outside party/force (the federal government and the desert). But, there's still a threat there, still some force that will compel their actions. Just because the person offering the trade isn't the one using the force doesn't mean it's not coerced through the existing threat.
Regardless of how that argument pans out, it seems to me the vast majority of people are going to agree that it's still "unfair" by almost any meaning of that word that an illegal immigrant feels the need to take jobs under conditions that they do not want and would not take otherwise. Even if they think that alternatives are even less fair (deportation, not being allowed to work at all), that doesn't make particularly low wages and bad working conditions fair. In fact, the lack of alternatives may be considered "unfair" on their own.
I feel like it's extremely difficult to argue that a person who remains in a location where they are repeatedly raped or have other crimes committed against them has been given a "fair" choice of options without coercion.
you evaded the question of Universal Basic Income the other day in Roatan. But UBI based on CREDITS not fiat / money / dollars / currency will supply plenty funds created by AI and robotization. Please acquaint your kinds selves to the CREATIVE SOCIETY for a rational solution to humanity not only US internal labor arrangements. Capish?
Not just illegal workers: legal workers under a visa that ties them to an employer face similar problems. That's one of the reasons I think such visas should be replaced by a system where the immigrant simply pays $X/year to the government in return for the right to reside and work in the country.
>Consider an employer that offers a job in exchange for sex from the worker. Or, worse, demands sex from the worker only after the job is being worked (to get around the clear transactional possibility in the first example).
Yes, that is worse, since it seems like a breach of contract, which includes a term (unstated but common knowledge) that sexual services are /not/ also required from the worker. So this is an easy case.
Your original case is more difficult for someone like me, who thinks that there is nothing wrong with sex work, any more than there is with (eg) accountancy. For, in that case, there would be nothing wrong with advertising for a sex-worker /who could do also your accounts/, and—what amounts to the same thing—advertising for an accountant /who could also provide sexual services. But such an advert would not get a favorable reception, since it would be deemed exploitative, even though it isn't.
In a society with balanced negotiations, the employee could choose to accept or decline the terms of the employment either at initial hire or when the terms changed. My point is that negotiations with people who are subject to deportation and other criminal sanctions are inherently unbalanced. The potential employee puts themselves at the mercy of the employer when they don't have the appropriate documentation to pass the I-9 form. The employer is supposed to refuse to hire them, but by doing them a "favor" of hiring them anyway, they create an obligation for the employee and also the terms by which they can blackmail that employee into accepting worse conditions.
I agree that in a balanced and libertarian society, an employer could offer a job of Accountant/Sex Worker and see what the going rate would be. Most likely that would be a very poor pairing that would either cost too much or result in poor work performance in one or both parts of the job. But it could be offered and then accepted or rejected as desired.
The reality is that requiring employees to provide sex under nebulous conditions is quite common. It can come with implied promises of promotions or pay increases, or from implied threats of termination or reporting for crimes (as with the illegal immigrants). Most people would refuse the offer, but the people on the margins may feel that it's the best option they have even when it's a bad option that most people in society seem to agree should not have been allowed to be offered.
I wasn't focusing so much on the risk of blackmail faced by people who are liable to be deported, and I agree that there is something amiss in that situation. I was more worried about the libertarian implication that offering a job as Accountant/Sex Worker is acceptable. In the end, I think it is, but that would be a world very different to ours.
I actually think that's pretty close to the world we already live in, at least prior to certain civil rights laws.
Real life is full of situations where someone was accused of "sleeping to the top" or whatever. Kamala Harris was accused of that even pretty recently (exactly how much she gained from sleeping with a powerful politician is up for debate, but that she slept with him at the same time he promoted her to important positions is not in question).
There are really good reasons that Accountant/Sex Worker positions don't actually exist, and rarely have in a formal sense. One, it causes dissention among the other employees. Obviously male employees who can't benefit, but also females who are not offered this option for whatever reason (not pretty, too old - stuff that's offensive to actually tell someone about why they weren't promoted). Two, as I mentioned above it's an inefficient situation. If you care about good accounting, hire a good accountant. If you care about good sex, seek that directly (many options). If you really want both from the same person, chances are you either give up some ability in one or both areas or pay a lot of money extra. Three, it's a really bad deal for most organizations, as only one person benefits from the sex side (the boss receiving the sex) while the rest of the organization only gets the accounting aspect. At a very small company, this may make some sense from an organizational perspective (i.e. the boss's perspective is nearly overlapping with the organization's perspective), but not for any larger company. Interestingly enough, it's not unusual for owners of very small companies to hire their wives to work an office position, which might be considered similar.
Agree with a lot of what you say here. Not sure it would be so difficult to fill such a position with an efficient candidate, since a man would only need (say) a qualified accountant who had a minimal amount of sexual experience and didn't really mind occasional sex with the boss. I'm sure there are such people.
So I don't know why the "sleeping to the top" idea didn't occur to me, which implies that there can be benefits in Accountant/Sex Worker for the potential employees, so that makes me worry less about such positions. And, true, offering such positions may have the practical disadvantages you mention. In principle, sex with the boss might be just another tedious aspect of the job that some people are prepared to do and others aren't, and that some people are better qualified than others for, but, no, it is not actually going to work that way, given the special sensitivities people actually have around sex.
That's how this hypothetical world of such jobs is importantly different from ours, I think.
You're exaggerating the problems and worrying too much.
Deportation is not some instantaneous operation. It takes time, and victims will use that time to report how they have been wronged.
Refusing to pay is theft, word will spread, the thieving employer will find fewer employees, and possibly some retribution and revenge. Sure it's not perfect, but there's also no such real world thing as completely libertarian employment, which presumably also relies strictly on reputational enforcement.
Kidnapping and rape are more criminal and abhorrent than merely refusing to pay for illegal work. At least some jurisdictions hold off deporting witnesses to such crimes.
These strike me as just more impossible hypothetical purity tests which don't really contribute to any real world situations.
I based my post on real life examples that have actually happened. Fear of being reported is extremely powerful, even if the end results would not be that bad. That's actually one of the major reasons that deportations take time and minimum wages as back pay is still due to illegal aliens (even when being deported) - to make it as easy and advantageous as possible to get out of such a bad situation.
There are still companies that either directly or indirectly (through hired supervisors) abuse and exploit the employees under these circumstances.
How hard is it for the illegal employee to just leave? Does the employer have an easy way of tracking him to turn him in?
That depends a lot on specifics. Sometimes the employer is also the landlord and banker, in which case it's very hard to leave. Also, sometimes employees are not very smart and are overwhelmed by fear (often intentionally induced by the employer) and make poor decisions about their options.
My guess is that most people in these situations can and do just leave. But not everyone can or knows that they can.
Your real life examples do not include any "completely libertarian employment" examples because there are none. I have my doubts about any countries with no employer regulation too.
"This is true even in a situation where the country has no OSHA, FLSA, or other employer regulation. Even a country with completely libertarian employment should see a problem when some employees do not have any bargaining power at all."
My contrary take is that all the problems you mention are just more examples of governments causing problems, not solving them. Bureaucrats have little incentive to fix the problems which keep them employed.
A perhaps better example of what most people would consider voluntary exploitation: A relationship where one partner is both economically and emotionally dependent on the other, and the other partner is kind of a total jerk, who treats the first partner in ways bordering on abuse by normal standards.
For the sake of argument let us say that you know with 100% confidence that both people would still be worse of single, and they will not be able to hook up with other people.
If you had the ability to break up such a relationship, would you do it? And if you did, wouldn't that be very close to reporting a person employing illegal migrants under terrible working conditions?
Yes, this is a difficult type of case. We suppose that personal relationships should operate by different rules than impersonal relationships, eg hard bargaining as individuals is appropriate in business relationships but not in a marriage, which should involve shared deliberation as a team. But if one partner is much stronger and more independent than the other, then hard bargaining will imply that he—let's suppose its a "he", since that is the case that worries people, though it does not have to be—should get the lion's share of the benefits of the relationship, and she the squirrel's share, which is not much of a marriage, and may even be abusive. Thus, some notorious types from the "manosphere" argue that very high status males can reasonably expect sexual fidelity from their wives while at the same time having other women on the side. This seems like an ugly relationship to me, ripe to be called exploitation, but some women are prepared to accept the deal, and I am not sure that free-market types (like myself) can really object.
For what it is worth I know a couple with what I believe to be that arrangement and the wife does not appear in the least oppressed. My guess is that she doesn't want other partners, very much wants her husband, and does not see other relations as a threat. They have been married for a long time.
The perils of generalization. Speaking for myself, I would be never accept such an arrangement (gender-flipped) with my wife, and would be morally indignant if she suggested it. But I know other men do accept it, and you say the wife does, so it would be interesting to hear their own perspective on their relationships.
Let me try to sharpen the analogy a bit, since I think it actually adresses the psychology of being against 'exploiting immigrants'.
Let us say your sister is in a relationship with an abusive jerk. She prefers to be with him, even though she knows he is an abusive jerk. You find out that the jerk also has been doing some white collar crime, like tax evasion. You can report your brother-in-law to the police, he will probably go to prison for some years, which will give you a chance to break the relationship up permanently, but you will in the same move totally bankrupt your sister, who right now is living a decent life economically on her husband's money.
Do you report your abusive brother-in-law to the police?
I think a lot of free market types might actually be tempted to do so, and we can perhaps use this as an intuition pump for understanding the people who would deport illegal immigrants in order to protect them from abusive employers.
How do you punish masochists, by not punishing them?
A strong presumption of agency solves a lot of problems. There was some legal case on the Volokh Conspiracy of a couple somewhat like you describe, notorious for his abusive behavior when drunk, her repeated breakups and reunions, which went on for years, and then she accused him of rape. I don't see how any trial could ever prove rape in such a case unless she had move across the country to get away and he had followed her years later.
In another case, a husband drove his family off a cliff which somehow didn't go very far, they were all rescued relatively unharmed, but the wife screamed to the rescuers that her husband had tried to kill them all. Then later, she refused to cooperate with police, claimed it was all a misunderstanding. Without some dashcam video, how could you ever prove anything? While it's easy enough to say she gets what she deserves, what do you do with the kids?
Sometimes life just sucks and there's not much any legal system can do about it.
If you know both participants would be worse off and you still do it, you're the jerk.
>any principal which implied that killing someone to harvest their organs is right would be a very bad approximation
I'm not really sure that's the case. Most people agree that upon committing certain acts (rape, murder etc.) you can lose freedom freedom, and in some places even your life. To take the most violent and unremorseful criminals and harvest their organs to save 5 of the most deserving people is not obviously abhorrent to me.
In terms of general moral principles:
When two parties, of equal moral standing, are negotiating a contract and one party is knowingly withholding information for their own advantage, they are exploiting the ignorant party.
When a trader has an effective monopoly on a plentiful, essential good/service, it is exploitative to charge a price which is an order of magnitude greater than the price he would charge in the face of competition.
I think these 2 principles summarize approximately how I feel about the scenarios presented, although I really struggle to quantify what price seems immoral. Saying a 'fair price' seems natural but it just raises the question, what is a fair price?
Even an order of magnitude would be acceptable in the 'dying of thirst' scenario. I'd certainly pay 10x the price and still be greatful in that situation.
"When two parties, of equal moral standing, are negotiating a contract and one party is knowingly withholding information for their own advantage, they are exploiting the ignorant party."
You are buying a house. You really like it, would pay the seller's asking price or even a little more if you had to. You don't tell the seller that, make a lower offer. That seems to fit your definition of exploitation, but it doesn't seem in the least wrong — any more than it is wrong for the seller who would, if necessary, accept a lower price to tell the buyer that. In such cases there is no presumption by either party that the other will tell him his true reservation price. I think something is missing from your definition.
Here is a different flavour of the same problem. Times are hard. The crops have just failed. A farmwife whose family is starving is made an offer. She can sell one of her daughters to the local brothel as a chattel-slave in exchange for enough money to feed all her family until their farm recovers and can start producing food again. This looks like a win all around. The brothel owner would prefer to have a new slave than the cash he bought her for. The family is better off for not starving to death. The brothel slave has the worst deal but it is still better than starving to death. The problem, as I see it, is that the institution of slavery is so vile that I will oppose any attempt to institute it, even if forbidding this sale means the family starves to death. I'm willing to die opposing it, to kill others opposing it, and to allow others to die opposing it.
I don't feel that strongly about people earning less than they could if they were in the country legally .... and could just take a different better paying job.
>This looks like a win all around
Not for the daughter, it seems, who is sold by /her mother/ into slavery. But free-market types will say that the individual has the right to decide /for themselves/ who to interact with, and therefore that they do /not/ have to endorse the outcome you describe.
But what if the mother decides to /sell herself/ into slavery, for the good of the family? It seems this will be a win all round (at least in terms of everyone's considered preferences, including the mother's), and the free-market types will have to endorse this outcome.
Do you think that slavery is so vile that this too should be stopped, even if the family starves to death? But is it any worse than, say, the father's finding the money they need by working himself to death in the newly opened silver mine?
The daughter is still better off having been sold into slavery than if she died of starvation. But yes, I think that slavery is so vile that she should be prevented from selling herself into slavery. And it is worse than 'father working himself to death at the newly opened silver mine' because father should have quit the mine and taken some other job instead. The wrongness here is ... why didn't he? And one of the many answers you do not want to get is 'because the only other jobs I am qualified to do are all being done by slaves'.
The real world case of defensible slavery is indentured servitude to pay the cost of immigration. A lot of immigrants in the early years were only able to get here by agreeing that when they landed the ship captain could auction them off. The winning bid was the one that offered to pay what they owed the captain for the shortest period of servitude.
Should that have been prevented?
For a different hard case consider a context, such as classical Greece, where the alternatives when one city won a war were to either kill the losers or enslave them. If you somehow had the power to prevent the slavery but not the killing, would you?
As it was practiced, yes, should have been prevented. The problem was not that the servant was able to contract their labour to pay for the cost of immigration, but that the labour laws should have prohibited certain behaviours. So, the servant should be able to pick their employers, and if they wanted to take a position where the work was more to their liking but paid their debt at a slower pace, then that should be allowed. They need to be allowed a certain amount of free time, which they could use to do, among other things, look for other employment.
And why do you think they didn't do it that way? It was a competitive market — multiple ships bringing people.
How would someone new to the country know enough about jobs and employers to make the choice on any grounds more elaborate than how short the period of indenture was?
The jobs were not all the same. You could already know if you wanted to work on a farm, vs as a maid in town, etc. Length of service was not the only thing that was significant to the indentured. But it is precisely because people couldn't investigate their positions before they took them that they needed the ability to sever their relationship with their master-employers if they found a better deal. And it is documented that many people took the offer under false promises -- they were promised a job doing as a house servant, but when they arrived they were sent to work the fields.
> For a different hard case consider a context, such as classical Greece, where the alternatives when one city won a war were to either kill the losers or enslave them. If you somehow had the power to prevent the slavery but not the killing, would you?
The issue arises once wars get started in order to acquire slaves.
That's a possibility. But suppose there are enough other reasons for wars, including some where the losers are killed rather than enslaved.
Well, in the Greek case, polities did decide to go to war with the agreement ahead of time that the victor would do neither. Or, the losers were enslaved -- but could immediately buy themselves out of slavery. It seems more like the legal justification for war reparations rather than a real choice here. On occasion wealthy people would ransom entire populations of city-states that lost a war -- apparently for the prestige, though figuring out the real motives of the ancients is always difficult. It is clear that the ancients thought of slavery differently than we do today. When slaves were allowed to own property, marry, and indeed own their own slaves, you begin to see something that looks more like employment than bondage. But that's not the treatment the slaves in the silver mines received.
Curiosity questions:
1. Were indentured servants actual slaves? Slaves could be killed, raped, etc, although I bet doing so in public would run afoul of various other laws.
2. My understanding of apprentices in "medieval" times, for some loose definition of "medieval", is that they too were bound to the master. Were they the same as indentured servants, slaves, ...?
3. How did classical Greeks differentiate winners and losers in a war? By accent, clothing, ...? How easy/hard was it for the losers to blend with the winners?
I have always had the impression that the primary reason slavery came to be associated with Africans was because skin color made such a natural marker, as opposed to different accents, clothing, etc. And it really went bonkers after Columbus because the new "empty" lands could absorb a lot more slaves than the few imported by the Arabs prior to Columbus. But I have no historical knowledge of this.
I doubt the indentured servant could be killed or raped, but don't know.
Apprentices were bound. I'm not sure what the penalties were for running away.
My guess is that the first generation slaves were distinguished by accent, their children not. I've seen no discussion of slaves pretending to be free. Those may have been small enough societies so that people knew which of their neighbors were citizens, which metics, which slaves.
Skin color would be a useful marker. I think you underestimate the scale of black slavery in al-Islam. There was at one point a slave revolt (Zanj) which held control of a substantial area for a while.
I did not know how extensive Arabian slavery was, and had never heard of the Zanj revolt. It makes me curious as to why more weren't sold to Europeans, and I can only guess that the climate, geography, and political structure were not conducive to slavery on that scale; but the Americas were, especially the tropical zones. I don't know enough about slavery to know why the climate matters that much, if it does, so maybe it's time to hunt down some books.
> I've seen no discussion of slaves pretending to be free.
Well Roman slave collars with tags that said "I've run away, my owner is so-and-so, reward of one solidus if recaptured" have been found.
Also at one point the Roman Senate was considering a law to require slaves to wear distinctive clothing. It was ultimately rejected lest the slaves should realize how many of them there were.
>The daughter is still better off having been sold into slavery than if she died of starvation
Yep, I take that point. So she could well have agreed to it herself. Still, I have my doubts about why selling herself into slavery is worse than her father's renting himself into a slow death at the silver mine. I don't quite understand your response:
>it is worse ... because father should have quit the mine and taken some other job instead
Doesn't the same apply to the daughter? That she should not have sold herself and taken some other job instead? I thought the example assumed that the family had no other options but to sell the daughter into sexual-slavery, or (I supposed) rent the father into a slow death. They both seem pretty bad to me, neither necessarily worse than the other, so that if it permissible for the father to choose death in the mine, it will be permissible for the daughter to choose slavery in the brothel. Or do you think that the death is not as vile?
The vile part is not having any other options for employment. If the institution of slavery did not exist, then the daughter could take a terrible job in a brothel, and her father could take a terrible job in a mine, but when something better came along they could quit and take the better job. A slave cannot. And slowly but surely, there are a class of low skill jobs that are all done by slaves because their owner can undercut the cost of the employed competition. It is rare for there to be an incentive to increase the productivity of slaves, to train them for better things and to make the job better because for them, because there isn't a constant competition for employees. The baumol effect doesn't apply either.
The institution of slavery is a cancer in the polity, one that has proven to be very difficult to remove.
Voluntary slavery is an oxymoron, and impossible to legally enforce without turning slavery into the default. But more to the point, a slave owner can offer just as much non-coercive inducement as any free employer, so the only benefit to slavery is the coercion, the morally repugnant urge to inflict harm and control other people, and since that reduces the work capability of the slave, it becomes the only reason for slavery.
>Voluntary slavery is an oxymoron, and impossible to legally enforce without turning slavery into the default
Don't see why it is an oxymoron, even if it is wrong. It /makes sense/ to say that people are self-owners, that owners can sell what they own to others, and therefore that a person can sell themselves to others, which is to become a slave. Still, some argue that self-ownership is inalienable, that, as a matter of fact, it is restricted in that you /may not/ sell yourself into slavery. What we need here is some argument why self-ownership differs in this respect from ownership of other things. You may well be right, however, about the complications about legalizing voluntary slavery.
>But more to the point, a slave owner can offer just as much non-coercive inducement as any free employer
I'm inclined to agree, in general, but, in the situation described, the family will eventually recover once the daughter earns enough money, and so the family will have an incentive to want her back, at a loss to the brothel owner, so that is one reason he might prefer to have her as a chattel-slave rather than a wage-slave. Sometimes its better to buy than to rent, and no need to assume any malicious desire to harm and control others.
To own means the right to control a rivalrous resource. Or more precisely - the right to exclude others. While you're alive it's impossible to relinquish control of your body, therefore it's impossible to transfer the ownership of your body to someone else, ergo voluntary slavery is impossible.
More about "if I own, I'm must have the right to sell, and if I can sell, I must own" fallacy see https://stephankinsella.com/2018/06/if-you-own-something-you-can-sell-it-fallacy/
>While you're alive it's impossible to relinquish control of your body
Not sure this is true in the relevant sense. True, I have direct control over the motions of my body (just like slaves do). But it is possible for me to always take orders from another person about what I do with my body, and that means they also have control (albeit indirect) over my (again, just like a slave). Of course, I don't ordinarily grant others such control, but I could, and, if I did—if the use of my body was completely at the discretion of another person—then I would have alienated myself into slavery
>if I own, I'm must have the right to sell, and if I can sell, I must own" fallacy
I grant that there are conceptions of ownership under which owning something does not imply the right to sell it on, and so, I agree, it is invalid to /draw an inference from/ ownership to the right to sell. But still, for a wide range of things, the right to transfer is one of the incidents of ownership, so, in my view, there is a /presumption/ that this applies also applies to self-ownership. It might be a mistaken presumption, but that needs to be argued, as I stated elsewhere in my comments.
> https://stephankinsella.com/2018/06/if-you-own-something-you-can-sell-it-fallacy/
Thanks. That looks quite interesting, and, having now given it a quick look, it /does/ draw an important distinction between ownership of self and ownership of externals, and (plausibly, in my view) grounds the former on the intimate relation we have to our bodies. The author rejects the idea that we appropriate our own bodies, which does seem odd. Problem, however—with respect to my mother, my body is an external, and so, since she created me de novo (ignoring the father's contribution), she owned me right from the start, and since ownership /of externals/ typically comes with absence of term, she owns me until she decides to free me. It seems that the default libertarian view has to be that /my mother/ owns me, not me.
I answered more fully above, but it comes down to slavery being uncontestable by the slave, since they are just property like dogs or furniture. You could kidnap someone, gin up a fake contract, with fake signature, real fingerprints, retina scans, and DNA, and even if the slave could interest someone else in contesting the contract, it can't be disproved. In the family example, suppose the daughter (or mother) was kidnapped and made to appear as a slave, unless the kidnapping itself can be proven, it's going to come down to a signed contract vs a family whose every incentive is to lie.
In effect, every human is susceptible to being turned into an irrevocable slave, without any practical recourse.
Even if you establish some kind of 90% slavery, the problem remains. How can you tell a real slave who has seller's remorse from a fake slave who wants his legitimate freedom back?
As I say, you may well be right about the complications about legalizing voluntary slavery, so that, even if it were morally permissible to sell oneself into slavery, it should still be illegal to do so, perhaps because of the risks you mention. I don't really have a strong view on that, one way or the other, and was focusing mostly on the morality (or otherwise) of it.
My objection to legal slavery is that it is an oxymoron, another one of those impossible libertarian purity tests. There is no way to make voluntary slavery legal without allowing criminals to falsely declare someone a slave and making it impossible to disprove.
* No contract signature is valid, since the slave only has to alter his repentant signature to undo the contract.
* Fingerprints, retina scans, DNA repositories, and other personal proofs can be submitted without the slave's consent.
* A slave can no more contest his slavery than a dog or table or any other property. That is the meaning of slave: no rights.
* Family and friends are far too biased to be reliable witnesses to prove the negative that the slave did not sign the contract.
Voluntary slavery turns the default condition of mankind into slavery. Since a slave owner can offer all the same inducements to work as any free employer, the only advantage a slave owner has is coercion, and since that reduces a slave's value, the only benefit to a slave owner is masochism and control freakery.
"There is no way to make voluntary slavery legal without allowing criminals to falsely declare someone a slave and making it impossible to disprove."
Doesn't that argument apply to selling anything? It should be illegal to sell land because someone could use a fraudulent deed to pretend it had been sold to him.
It is pretty easy to imagine legal rules that would make it hard to claim someone had sold himself to you if he hadn't, just as we have legal rules to do the same thing for land.
Competing owners can both argue. A slave cannot argue on his own behalf.
Someone claimed to be a slave can argue on his own behalf to any court that is not certain the claim is true. I don't see why you assume that everyone takes the claim as true and acts accordingly.
A related reply is that if slavery is legal and common, there will be two types of slave: docile and uppity. The uppity ones scare people into worrying about slave revolts. Anyone hearing a slave yelling he is a kidnapped free man is going to think about slave revolts before he thinks of coming to the aid of a possible but rare kidnapped free man.
Any hearings on the possibility would have to be rare too, otherwise every slave owner could spend half the day in court defending his ownership. There have to be some real and expensive costs associated with all accusations, not just false ones.
I just don't see any way to make voluntary slavery legal and common without opening the flood gates to kidnapped false slaves. I believe slavery only survived in antiquity because slaves were foreigners captured in battle or had some other distinctive traits, and were involuntary.
Debt slavery existed.
In theory, sure. But in practice, the owner can cut out his tongue. The owner can also threaten whipping his slave if anyone contests his ownership; how many people would be willing to cause such pain without knowing the slave personally? Yes, the owner damages his property, but the alternative is losing the property and going to jail or becoming a slave too. The slave can't contest his contract signature except by signing something , and his incentive is to sign differently. DNA, fingerprints, and retina scans can be copied.
In practice, I don't see how any slave can protest his condition any better than a dog can. It takes outside parties with independent proof, and those are the kind of people who kidnappers will avoid.
Would it be possible to take on a debt with your vital organs as security? If we allow selling organs, we could possibly also use them as a guarantee for a loan.
In that case you would probably be a slave to the person with a deed to a pound of flesh from your heart.
In many historical periods debt slaves was treated pretty much like captured slaves.
The only vital organs I could imagine are a kidney and lung. If there are other paired organs, them too. I have heard that livers can be cut in half and continue to function well enough, possible regrow to full size. But a pound of heart is meaningless, like being half pregnant.
I think a heart is worth more than a kidney on the grey market, but we really don't have to actually sell it. The question is, if one person owned the right to remove the lungs of another person any time he liked, how would that be different from slavery?
Alternatively, let us say that it is illegal to sell your organs (except kidneys), but you can still take on personal debt. In that case, what powers would a creditor have over a debtor? Can he confiscate the debtors house and car? Can he confiscate all the debtor's clothes? Can he take the debtor's food and any money the debtor ever makes? Do you operate with debtor's prisons?
The way you legislate the relationship between creditor and debtor will determine whether a society can or cannot have voluntary slavery. Most modern countries have explicit laws protecting people so you are allowed to earn money and live even if you owe a gajillion dollars to somebody else, but as soon as you earn anything over a the minimum required to live, you can be forced to pay.
This doesn't make any sense: "if one person owned the right to remove the lungs of another person any time he liked"
If one person owned the right to remove 1 cubic centimeter of brain matter of another person any time he liked.
If one person owned the right to remove two toes of another person any time he liked.
If one person owned the right to ....
None of it makes any sense.
My point is only that if a legal system allow a creditor to confiscate any of a debitor's possesions, including food, shelter, clothes (and possibly organs) then you can have legal debt slavery.
there is no exploitation absent force, fraud, or duress.
That is my inclination. But consider the strong version of the water in the desert hypothetical which I described in the text I linked to. His price is everything you own and three-quarters of your income for the next forty years. Is there anything wrong with that? If you were the one agreeing to those terms would you consider yourself morally bound to adhere to them?
I think that counts as duress, even though the other party is not responsible for putting him in the desert. He is signing a contract with the equivalent of a gun to his head. Weaker versions, like I am hungry so I am paying $100 for a sandwich at the only gas station within 100 miles, are not duress. I don't have a principled way of deciding how extreme the situation has to be to count as duress.
But then any contract for something very important to you counts as under duress, including most marriages. I think the point of not enforcing contracts under duress is that the person you are contracting with has imposed the duress, which in this case he has not.
I wouldn't go that far. If your BATNA is an agonizing death, you are under duress. If your BATNA is finding some other girl to date, you are not under duress. If an unrelated third party holds gun to your head while you sign the contract, it's duress, even though none of the signatories is responsible for imposing the duress.
"Some other girl to date."
Sounds as though you have never been in love.
Wouldn't that be "duress" in the purest sense? Even if we accept such a solution for the sake of the person's life, we could still agree that it was exploitative.
I square this circle somewhat by agreeing that some exploitation is acceptable, and some exploitation is actually desirable. Indentured servants coming to the US were definitely exploited in most senses of that word, but seemed to be more than okay with that on balance of their lives.
On the other hand, actual slaves were also exploited, but at least contemporary people don't consider that to be okay in any sense.
In what sense were indentured servants exploited? They had agreed to the contract and benefited by it.
If there's any sense in using the word "exploitation" to describe a work situation, that seems like the prime example. The word means to treat someone unfairly. In practice many of the indentured servants died before finishing their service. All lived in harsh conditions. All only joined up for lack of other options (anyone who could have chosen a different option certainly would have).
Perhaps that's a distinction to look at for your original question. If someone had a free choice, would they ever choose that trade? No one would ever willingly trade their house for a drink of water, and knowing the relative difficulty of getting those two items we can infer that for approximately 100% of all cases. To me, that sounds like a form of duress. How to draw the line between "duress" and "normal economic considerations" does seem like quite a challenge still. I agree with you that Walmart should be able to charge more for water in the wake of a hurricane, even though that's still duress. But again, I'm morally comfortable with saying that some levels of exploitation is acceptable, so I'm not too bothered by this distinction.
How do you know that many lived in harsh conditions and died before finishing their service? They had another option — not coming to America — since they could not afford the trip except on those terms.
No one would trade his house for water unless he was lost in the desert and the water would save his life — but this person is lost in the desert. Nobody would work for $20/hour if he could get the same job at $30. What's the difference? Why are circumstances not relevant to what is a fair trade?
I'm a simple person, and that is exactly my position.
In addition, the hypotheticals bother me precisely because they are so impossible. I understand the use of impossible hypotheticals, but they don't tell me anything about the real world or people's real principles. They are like dividing by zero; interesting in various ways, but useless for real people in the real world.
There are two libertarian impossible hypotheticals I am familiar with.
A burglar throws you out of your tenth floor apartment, you save yourself by grabbing onto the ninth floor balcony, and the ninth floor occupant tells you to stop trespassing; do you let go?
A comet is heading towards Earth and the only thing which can save all humanity is a rocket which, alas, is broken for lack of a 25 cent part whose owner refuses to sell; do you steal it?
They don't educate me at all whichever way they are answered. This glass of water for a house hypothetical is just as meaningless.
The baseball card scenario isn't a whole lot better. While people do occasionally make the news for finding valuable paintings or antiques, the only real lesson is that the seller is not very good at his business. If it's fraud to not tell him of the trading card's real value, is it fraud to not go through all his other wares and evaluate them? Is it fraud to not hire experts for all his other wares to get proper evaluations? Is it fraud to not spend all your spare time investigating everyone else selling baseball cards to see what they are undervaluing?
No. Exploitation requires fraud. If the antique dealer recognizes you as an expert when you walk in before you've seen his cards, and asks your opinion but refuses to pay for your appraisal, feel free to buy it for a dollar and sell it for a million. If he pays for your opinion, or you offer it for free, and you lie, there's the exploitation.
Interesting evolution of memes. Your first one is modified from Bill Bradford's hypothetical, adding the burglar and replacing the flagpole with the balcony. The second is mine from _Machinery_ plus a little more detail.
The point of these is to push you to think about whether your principles are as absolute as libertarians like to claim. If someone supports taxation because he believes that without it there would be catastrophic failure, is "taxation is theft and theft is always wrong" an adequate argument? If, in the hypotheticals where a rights violation produces an enormous benefit, you would be willing to do it, then it isn't adequate. You need to deal with his reasons for believing that without taxation there would be a catastrophic collapse.
I'm not surprised at borrowing yours, since you've written a lot of good books. I think the only stance I may never understand is protection rackets. I'll have to go back and see how I changed yours. The balcony/flagpole one I would have thought to be from you too, so no idea how my memory mangled it.
I do understand the purpose of the hypotheticals, but some of them seem so impossible or contrived that it's hard to take them seriously. The trolley problem is not quite as bad as the balcony/flagpole and rocket part; it seems actually plausible, and easy to modify to be even more plausible.
For instance, I live in the boonies near a small town with unmarked roads (two lanes, but no shoulder markings, centerline, crosswalks, etc), and always edge away from dog walkers because few use leashes and dogs are unpredictable. I edge away so I can stop watching them in favor of watching for oncoming traffic, and always wonder what I'd do if said oncoming traffic were coming too fast to avoid me, and my only option of avoiding it would be to aim for the shoulder and hope the dog and walker were alerted by the noise of the oncoming speeder and jumped for the bushes. But that assumes a lot, and they are far more likely to be seriously hurt for not reacting instantly than any car crash at 20-30 mph. Would it be better to veer away from the dog walker and go for a head-on collision, to avoid spinning into the dog walker, and hope that a straight head-on would harm both cars' occupants less than spinning? Would it be better to try to come as close as possible to the walker and hope the other driver tries to hug his shoulder? Would it be better to slam on the brakes and lose all mobility and ability to steer clear?
Luckily, in 25 years here, none of this has ever even come close to a reality, but it does always make me think of the trolley problem when I pass a walker on the shoulder.
You might have gotten Bill's from me, I sometimes use it, usually remember to credit to him.
You probably did. I just checked my eBook version of Mechanics, and can't find "rocket" or "comet". But it's an odd version, whose ToC is just chapter numbers, no names, so who knows where I got it from.
(Interesting point. If it shows out that you are not an American my reply below will sound pretty dumb)
I generally believe the very smooth american style libertarianism where all counter arguments sound unrealistic is an effect of not having had war on your own soil since the 1860's.
A lot of hypotheticals actually popped up during the last world war and had to be delt with:
1: You have a formally neutral country (Vichy France, Portugal) which is holding on to strategically important land. Can you invade them if you are a libertarian?
2: You are in a neutral country that is pressured into selling war material to Germany (Denmark). Are you allowed to blow up a privately owned factory?
3: Illegal Jewish refugees wants to help to get to a country without German presence. Can you steal a boat to help them? If you are a captain of a privately owned ship, can you let them stow away in it without telling the owner of the ship or the rest of the crew?
4: You believe a normal private person is feeding information to the police about the former two activities, but you don't have any real evidence. Are you allowed to shoot him? Or perhaps blow his house up to send a message?
(Notice again, all of this is happening inside a 'formally neutral' country).
I know these four questions don't have anything to do with the question at hand, but I think if you want to fully hold on to a philosophical stand point you need to face the hardest questions relating to it.
(Yes, American)
To the first three, YES, absent other factors such as the boat owner and his family being executed by the occupying force. The fourth, no, because of the doubt, although the degree of doubt may play a role.
I look at them as balancing harm. Is the harm you do less than the potential or actual harm it would mitigate? It's the same with the 25 cent rocket part and the balcony trespasser. The glass of water in the dessert is just silly, trying to imagine how such a scenario could even arise as stated.
That is a reasonable utilitarian position but not one most ideological libertarians are willing to take.
Most political screeds get bogged down in such minutia that I try to avoid them. I think I'd describe myself as wanting to follow ideological purity until it twists itself in knots over balconies and rocket ship parts, then I punt to pragmatism to avoid the headaches over angels on pinheads.
At a considerable tangent, the angels on pinheads was not actually an absurd argument. The point was to think about whether an angel had only location or also took up space. If that seems a silly question because you don't believe in angels, consider the distinction more generally. You can't fit two people in the same place but an unlimited number of people's thoughts can be on that place. That was also the answer for angels, not that three or four could fit but that an unlimited number could.
My answer was incomplete. There's more to it than that.
I think "Rule of Law" is a figment of lawyers' imagination, a fig leaf to cover up the naughty "Rule by Men" which they'd rather pretend doesn't exist. Laws are interpreted by Men, and nothing shows that more than an Appeals Court first reversing a trial court 2-1, then affirming it en banc 8-7, and the Supreme Court making its own 5-4 decision.
Why do courts eliminate the ten kilos of heroin found in a car as evidence, instead of allowing it but prosecuting the cops for their illegal search? — Because prosecuting cops is bad karma, and government employees look out for each other.
So they have to add to that fig leaf with a lot of quibbly rules which drift further and further from any objective Rule of Law which could actually be understood by the poor schmucks who are supposed to understand and obey, more or less instantly, what courts take years to not decide in the form of split decisions.
Thus once ideological purity runs into the quibbly realm of flagpoles and trespassing and angels on pinheads, my sense of justice lifts that fig leaf and falls back on those utilitarian comparisons.
I don't think I'm describing that very well. My substack is full of similar less-than-articulate ramblings which I'm trying to condense down to a single book-length screed. It has helped me consolidate my thoughts, and my only real audience is myself. It's only taken 15 years so far. Maybe I'll have a clearer answer in another 15.
Interesting. So you do believe you are allowed to disregard other peoples' property rights if there is a clear and big benefit to humanity from doing so.
What do you think about the current discussion about PEPFAR? Should the US government be allowed to force taxpayers to pay for AIDS medicine to third world countries?
All four are somewhat trick questions with so many variables that any number of answers are valid. You are obviously referring to WW II, and trying to overlay a libertarian government on top of any of the participants is a hopeless task. Would any libertarian government have even been able to join the war? For instance, I believe the US has zero need for any military. The idea of a coastal invasion is laughable. The idea of Canada or Mexico invading militarily is laughable. A libertarian government would enable an armed society making the current society look unarmed by comparison.
So here are more serious answers.
1: Unanswerable, because a libertarian government would never be in the position of making such a decision.
2. No libertarian government can force private companies to sell anything to anybody.
3. Same as before; I would base it on whether stealing the boat would lead to more harm for the boat owner than the refugees, or I would try to buy it, rent it, or make it look like the Nazis had stolen it. There are too many variables for any better answer.
4. The level of proof would have to be very high for me to consider killing someone to protect others.
ETA: As for PEPFAR, that question doesn't apply to a libertarian government.
I was originally thinking about what a person who believed in libertarianism would do in those circumstances (here libertarianism is the philosophical belief that you should respect other people's right to property and bodily autonomy except when they themselves refuse to respect other people's rights to the same).
I have a great grandfather who had to face some of the latter questions, and wrote a book about the implications.
But it might also be interesting to look at it from a purely societal perspective. Let us grant the following:
1) All countries in the world have abolished their armies, their police and have stopped taxing the population.
2) There still exist some kind of Icelandic saga era legal system which protects people's personal rights, possibly only using the threat of outlawry.
3) Somehow there still exist a global economy with long supply chains.
Even in such a world, you would still have groups like the nazis! They might just not be able to declare themselves leaders of a country, but imagine what an organization of a few hundred thousand brown shirts with guns could get away with, particularly if all other gun owners are unable to coordinate into big groups.
Let us say that in our world there comes into being a paramilitary group called 'the Virtous Righthanders'. They have three primary goals:
-To protect other citizens from crime.
-To remove thrash from public spaces.
-To cut the left hand of all left handed people! Sieg Rechts!
Occasionally an individual Righthander might get outlawed on the thing, but he will always be able to hide with other members of his movement. Usually other people are too scared of the movement to try to bring charges against them.
Some lefthanded people figure out what companies the Righthanders are buying their weapons from. Then they find the factory that is providing the tools that the weapon manufacturers are using. This is tools which are also used by a lot of other companies, but they are the best place to shut down the supply chain and stop the Righthanders access to weapons.
Are the left handed resistance movement allowed to blow up the privately owned tool factory?
(Also, I don't quite get why PEPFAR doesn't apply to a libertarian government?)
Libertarians believe in property rights, that means you owe restitution if you violate them, not that you shouldn't ever violate them no matter what.
While socialists believe you're entitled to take other people's stuff with no compensation if you need it very much.
"that means you owe restitution if you violate them, not that you shouldn't ever violate them no matter what. "
That appears to justify eminent domain, seizing property for a payment the owner has not agreed to.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet in the other comments:
Economic predictions often rely on a variety of assumptions—some implicit, others explicit—such as that people are rational, possess all necessary information, can always choose to refuse a trade, and are free from legal constraints. It is partly on the basis of these assumptions that economists conclude that freedom of association maximizes welfare.
A voluntary trade between two parties can be considered exploitation if:
1. There is a significant discrepancy in how well these assumptions hold for each party, clearly favoring one over the other.
2. The disadvantaged party would likely not accept the trade if their disadvantages were remedied.
3. The advantaged party is aware of this and does nothing to rectify the imbalance.
Exploitation is problematic because, absent the usual economic assumptions, there is no compelling reason to believe that these voluntary trades maximize welfare compared to alternative arrangements.
I do not actually know if this explanation of exploitation holds up under scrutiny, but I think it reflects the implicit models in your interlocutor's mind, and it does not seem unreasonable.
For the rare trading card, the assumptions that do not hold well are information availability and perhaps market access. For the water in the desert, it is the impossibility to refuse the trade on pain of death. For the Mexican immigrants, it is the legal constraints under which they operate.
I suspect their opinion about why they support deporting "exploited" immigrants is not because they care about the well being of the immigrants, indeed they acknowledge that they'd be worse off in their home country. Instead I think what they might care about is punishing the alleged exploiter, because they don't like his behavior. Depriving him of people to exploit, i suppose, being the full extent of the punishment. Perhaps they simply want to find ways of not rewarding exploitative behavior. It might also be a cognitive dissonance attempt to justify beliefs they are too ashamed of to say out loud.
There is indeed a stable equilibrium in which everyone commits to never accepting less than half the gains, but it's not the only possible one. If everyone committed to never accepting less than 90% of the gains, then no one will ever get anything; but in that case anyone who instead only commits to never accepting less than 10% of the gains does really well by it (as 10% is a lot better than nothing.) The equilibrium here is reached when half of people have a commitment to accepting no less than 90%, and the other half have a commitment to accepting no less than 10%. (This is an equilibrium because were it not half-and-half, there will be those who are unable to find deal partners (if the majority is 90%ers), and thus would have been better off with the opposite commitment; or (if the majority is 10%ers) could switch to the opposite and get more out of each transaction.)
This seems like a good example of what might be meant by "exploitation"—a world in this 90%-10% equilibrium is one which could fairly be described as half the people (those committed to receiving no less than 90%) exploiting the other half.
That is not an equilibrium. Someone who switches from 10 to 90 gets nine times as much half as often. You need to have most of the people committed to 90 to make it an equilibrium.
Yeah, I see what you mean. My bad, you're right, the equilibrium point here isn't half-and-half.
But there are other equilibria than everyone committing to accept no less than half, right? And that seems to cut at what people mean by "exploitation", while still consisting only of people doing purely positive-sum interactions. If you're committed to taking no less than 90%, and I grit my teeth and accept 10% rather than nothing, I both have benefited from our interaction and yet it seems not too unreasonable for me to feel hard done by in the manner that the word "exploitation" seems to capture.
On the other hand, changes in the initial property rights setup can change positive sum interactions into negative sum ones, and vice versa. Someone who threatens to smash up my car unless I pay him cash equal to half the car's value to me (or 90%, or 10%, or any other amount) is wronging me, but someone who will give me his car (which would otherwise be destroyed, for some reason) for half the car's value to me (or 10%, or 90%) is not at all wronging me (even if no further negotiation on price is possible, take it or leave it). In both scenarios I can choose to have a car, and pay a fraction of its value to me, or not have a car and keep my cash.
So it's clear the ultimatum structure alone does not determine if the offerer is in the wrong, no matter the offer.
David, how does the quality and quantity of market information possessed by the person, whom we analyzing to determine if they were exploited, factor into this? I think you would agree that a person not being "of sound mind" would be an easy mark for exploitation, but what if they are of sound mind but simply the lack of intelligence or the ability to understand how to maximize their personal utility? How would that factor into your calculation of exploitation?
We pay for insurance because we fear potential future losses and we want to reduce the exposure to those losses and are willing to pay a present price to do so. The more likely and more severe we believe those future losses to be, the more we would be willing to pay for insurance to mitigate them. So, when fearing one's imminent demise (or that of those we care about) a person would likely pay a very high price to avert that scenario.
When a person is lost in the desert, in a forest, or in a park near their home, they may reasonably, or unreasonably, have an extreme fear for their life and be willing to exchange anything and everything they have rights to in order to alleviate this fear. Would it be exploitive to offer to escort this person to safety for everything they own? What if, unbeknownst to them, they were on the verge of making to safety without any assistance, but they did not know that-- information asymmetry? What if you understood that technology has enabled the mass misleading of people and manipulation of them to make personal utility choices that are deeply subobtimal--would you see anything wrong with that?
Through these questions I am trying to make a case that there may be times when governmental regulation to prevent exploitation, such as price gouging, may be warranted. Please note that I qualified this with "there may be times" because I do believe that there are also times where, what we think of as price gouging is warranted and results in the more efficient allocation of resources.
I think it is wrong to exploit someone's ignorance but, unless you have deliberately misled them, not the sort of wrong that should be corrected by force. I can imagine someone who knows he is in that sort of position adopting, or being advised to adopt, a commitment to always making the deal conditional on the other person not having knowledge that makes the deal obviously a bad one.
But not permitting the deal seems like a violation of the person who is agreeing to it.
I agree with you, that doesn't seem exploitative.
I could clarify that 'it is only withholding information which the ignorant party would expect you to divulge that is immoral/exploitative'...but I suspect there would still be a counterexample which I would concede.
I wouldn't be upset if I learned that my morality couldn't be classified to infinite precision in finite words. At least I'm not dogmatic.
When the word illegal workers or illegal immigrants is printed or broadcasted, the general public in America relates the profile to Mexican and Central Americans, including some that unbeknownst to the public are already American citizens and residents with green cards in their wallets and purses.
Two, stateside who is being exploited is the taxpayer´s money used to wake the woke and fund the entitlements of majorities posing as minorities.
I think the water in the desert issue comes down to a conflict between two different moral intuitions: exploitation and minimum obligations to other humans in need. The exploitation aspect is the salient aspect because we think about that a lot, but the obligations aspect is the one doing the work, we just don't think about such things much.
Consider the slight difference in the desert example: the guy doesn't need a drink of water, he needs $10,000 dollars to pay off his bookie so he can stop hiding in the desert and return home. It doesn't seem like many people would say "absolutely, it would be wrong not to give it to him" like they do with the water example. Yet if he just needed 5$ it does start to seem kind of shameful to not toss him a fiver to get him out of trouble.
If the fellow in the desert doesn't need a glass of water, but instead needs a blood transfusion, or a $10,000 air lift out of the desert that you have to pay for, suddenly asking for his house as payment seems more reasonable.
If it starts to matter a lot how much the amount of aid is it seems to me that the important aspect isn't exploitation but violating basic norms of helping people a little if you can and they need it. This is the same stuff that hospitality requirements are made of, or other, general "failure to do good" type expectations. While we might not be willing to punish people in every case, we generally blame them and think less of them for not doing a small and easily achievable bit of good. We don't generally today have clear rules and expectations for these things so we don't think of them in our (relatively) flat considerations of ethics, but they are important, and seem to have been more important in the past, presumably because people lived a little closer to the edge.
I agree. I think part of the system of norms I am familiar with is that you help strangers if doing so is no trouble, tell them where the restroom is and the like. An hour or two ago I asked someone in the airport where I could get a hot chocolate and he pointed me at a Starbucks. But violating those norms isn't exploitation, it just marks you as someone not worth cooperating with short of an explicit agreement, lowers your status but doesn't make you liable to punishment.
Indeed, the bathroom and coffee shop directions are good examples. It is interesting to me that many philosophers, modern ones anyway, seem to struggle a bit with that blameworthy tier of bad behavior. That some behavior should mark someone as an asshole who people dislike but not leave them liable for punishment is a big part of Smith’s theory, but moderns seem to want to categorize everything as perfectly fine or punishable. I find myself wondering why that is, what happened that the concepts of right and wrong got flattened down so much.
There may be other water suppliers.
The savior may have an ambulance and can rescue the guy and get him back to civilization.
The savior may suddenly realize some omnipotent being dumped him in a desert with some dying guy, and decide he wants to drink the water himself.
The savior may be a misplaced border guard who shoots the dying guy and drinks the water himself.
I really don't like these extremely artificial hypotheticals.
Are you responding to my post? I don’t see the connection if so.
I think even if you have a problem with "exploitation", the solution to the problem of someone finding a man lost in the desert and dying of thirst and selling him water for the deed to his house isn't to ban water!
People usually don't want to ban water; they just want to not force the guy to honour the agreement to give up his house.
Yes, but in the end libertarians often take that to be the same thing. If you make it known that such agreements will not be enforced, then it reduces the incentive to give the guy the water. It also can make it hard to find a reasonable level that society will enforce. Is $100 okay for a glass of water? How about $1,000? At some arbitrary and nebulous point, society may decide not to enforce the contract, making it less likely that future deals will be made no matter how necessary.
I took the scenario to be a one-off incident where the only incentive that should be needed is that you don't want to be responsible for the guy's death. I'm sure intuitions would be different if we were talking about installing water fountains in the desert and charging for their use.
A libertarian might wonder why there is only one water supplier. Surely if one random water supplier can find the guy lost in the desert, so can others, and competition will bring the price down to its natural level, presumably much closer to cost.
That's just another problem with these artificial purity test questions. They set up such bizarre situations that specifically preclude real answers.
Well, the case is devised to force us to evaluate the specific moral valance that is in question. If this was a street corner in New York, your answer would be obvious - someone would sell water for less. But being in a desert makes it sound remote, and the fact that you meet this dying man is a pure coincidence that offers this man an option that moments before was not an option. He was going to die without you, and now that you are there it's possible for another option to be on the table.
That's why David used that example, offering the water at any price is strictly better than the current situation. At worst he can still reject the offer and die, which is no worse than the existing situation.
My dislike is based on making up such artificial situations with such strange constraints that no answers have any basis in reality. Like Shakespeare's pound of flesh, or the similar pound of heart in these comments -- we base our answers on our experiences, and expecting meaningful answers from nonsensical impossible scenarios is itself a waste of time.
See my comment on the trolley problem as being at least plausible and relatable to a real life example. No one wanders the desert with an extra glass of water. You may as well ask what would happen if you played four in a row on a 3x3 tic-tac-toe game.
I partly agree. I do have concerns about pushing hypotheticals too far, and agree entirely that intuition pump scenarios should be viewed skeptically.
In this specific example, it's not impossible to imagine that something like this has happened in real life. Someone goes walking through the desert and comes across another person who ran out of water. Expanding this beyond the exact details of the scenario risks adding a lot of unspoken confounders, so I would be very hesitant to say something like "and therefore store owners shouldn't be allowed to raise prices during an emergency" which is where some people would take this train of thought.
Great post! Thank you. As for the issue of paying a lower price for illegal immigrants’ work, this issue goes away in a free market as employers bid up prices until they achieve equilibrium with all wages (“Free to Choose”).
As for the guy dying of thirst, this falls outside of civilization so it’s a lifeboat problem, which eliminates the domain necessary for morality to exist (i.e., civilization). But as described it is still a trade between the two men (the dying man can always choose death). Civilization is the precondition for questions of morality. The premise that an individual isn’t free trade his labor at the market price because that individual isn’t free to associate with Americans or isn’t free to operate his body at the invitation of an American businessman on private property is in contradiction to the concept of a moral civil society.
> His argument was that they were being exploited by being paid less than other workers, that that was bad and they should be expelled to prevent it.
This is a bit like saying the patient must be killed so a doctor does not profit from his illness.
Why not propose that remove any work related restrictions on illegal immigrants so they do not have to work for lower wages at all ? That serves dual purpose. It protects US citizens from unfair(!) competition, reduces illegal immigration of people who have not unique skill other than working for very low wages and also prevents employers from unfairly profiting. Also saves government money to maintain massive staff to do work permits and labor market socialism and expenses on deportation.
For all I know he would have supported that. The question was whether, given the existence of the laws that make the immigrant illegal, he should be deported.