Currently viewing the tag: "exploitation"

Left-Libertarianism and the Ownership of Natural Resources

By On April 24, 2012 · 21 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Left-libertarianism, Libertarianism, Rights Theory, Symposium on Libertarianism and Land

To start off: Why should libertarians be bothered about, specifically, rights to natural resources?1 Why single out these entitlements, rather than looking at property rights in general and asking how any of them can be justified, if they can be justified at all? After all, the domain of distributive justice – of moral [...]

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Can you sell your future self into slavery?

By On April 13, 2012 · 44 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Exploitation, Libertarianism, Social Justice

Liberty of contract is a really important right, and legal restrictions on liberty of contract are offensively paternalistic, and are sometimes racist or sexist attempts to entrench the advantage of existing economic stakeholders. Libertarians are often distinguished from progressives based on their opposition to legal restrictions of economic liberties, such as the decision to

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Workplace Coercion

By On March 12, 2012 · 40 Comments · In Academic Philosophy, Exploitation, Left-libertarianism, Rights Theory

Coercion is a really difficult concept to define. When theorists say things like “the workplace is a site of coercion” what does that mean, and what should we do about it? One way of understanding coercion is in a non-moralized way. This strategy says that an act [...]

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Sweatshops, Exploitation, and Neglect

By On November 8, 2011 · 18 Comments · In Current Events, Exploitation, Social Justice

Ari Kohen responds to my recent post on sweatshops with a few lingering concerns.  Among other things, he raises important questions about whether the evils of sweatshop labor can be compensated for by increased charitable giving, and about whether we shouldn’t recognize that American companies have [...]

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Shouldn’t Sweatshops Do More?

By On November 3, 2011 · 43 Comments · In Current Events, Exploitation, Social Justice

Sophisticated critics of sweatshop labor recognize that sweatshop jobs make workers better off, but argue that sweatshops should do more to improve the lives of workers – that they should make them even better off by paying higher wages, or providing better working conditions.

In a thoughtful post at Running Chicken, Ari Kohen raises precisely this objection to 

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Answering the Left-Libertarian Critique of Sweatshops

By On October 24, 2011 · 108 Comments · In Current Events, Exploitation, Left-libertarianism, Libertarianism, Social Justice

Ben Powell and I have a new paper coming out in the Journal of Business Ethics in which we defend what we take to be the mainstream libertarian position on sweatshops against some critiques that have emerged in the recent academic literature.*  That position (which I have [...]

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Libertarianism and the Just Price?

By On May 6, 2011 · 45 Comments · In Libertarianism, Social Justice

I’ve been listening to Murray Rothbard’s Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, available as a free PDF here or as a free audiobook narrated by the sonorous Jeff Riggenbach here.  Early on, there’s an extended discussion of the idea [...]

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