CNN is currently running a feature on human trafficking.  This is a topic about which I know less than I probably should, given my ongoing research interest in exploitation.  But it doesn't appear that much serious philosophical work has been done on the topic.  And this is unfortunate, since most popular and some scholarly discussions of it seem to blur important moral distinctions.

Here, for instance, is one of CNN's "5 things to know about human trafficking":

"Human trafficking is modern-day slavery. It involves one person controlling another and exploiting him or her for work. Like historical slavery, human trafficking is a business that generates billions of dollars a year. But unlike historical slavery, human trafficking is not legal anywhere in the world. Instead of being held by law, victims are trapped physically, psychologically, financially or emotionally by their traffickers."

Similarly, my own university’s Trans-Border Institute published its own report on human trafficking,  that attempts to define the practice as follows:

“Broadly speaking, human trafficking pertains to the use of a human being(s) as a commodity for the profit of other(s)… Human trafficking includes the following: forced labor in agriculture, domestic service, construction work, transportation, restaurant services, and sweatshops; commercial sexual exploitation, which involves prostitution, pornography, and sex tourism through various outlets such as massage parlors, friendship clubs, brothels, and beauty parlors; the forced sale of organs; and illegal adoptions (California Alliance to Combat Trafficking and Slavery, 2007, p. 17).”

What seems to be going on with both these accounts, and with much of the discourse surrounding “trafficking,” is that a number of seemingly morally bad practices that involve people crossing borders are all being lumped together in a single moral category.  But this is unhelpful for 3 reasons.

1. Not all of the practices are equally bad, or even bad at all.  Kidnapping somebody and forcing them to work for you against their will is clearly bad.  Getting someone’s consent and bringing them to the United States to work in the sex industry, on the other hand, is not obviously wrong, and certainly not a wrong of the same magnitude as forced labor.
2. Even if the practices are all bad, they are bad for very different reasons.  Forced labor can be opposed on the basis of very uncontroversial premises about the importance of negative liberty, self-ownership, or autonomy.  If there is a case against voluntary prostitution, it’s going to be based on very different moral values: a kind of legal moralism, or paternalism, or concerns about third-party effects, perhaps.
3. Even if the practices are all bad, the best ways of responding to them will be very different.  Legally prohibiting coercion makes sense because coercers make their victims worse off.  Legally prohibiting exploitation often doesn’t make sense because exploiters often leave their victims better off (even if they treat them unfairly).

If there is some work out there that does a better job sorting out the moral issues, I’d certainly appreciate my readers bringing it to my attention.  For now, though, here are some issues that have jumped out at me in what little reading I have done on the subject:

• Fraud – Trafficking often involves deceit.  Workers will be told that if they pay a certain amount of money to an agent, they will be brought into the United States and given a job of a certain kind.  But sometimes the job does not exist at all; sometimes the working conditions and pay are not as they were described; sometimes the agent ends up demanding more money than he initially requested, and so forth.

• Coercion – Sometimes, trafficker might employ direct coercion in order to get victims to leave their homes and go with them across the border.  Perhaps more often, coercion is employed after the victims have left home and are in a vulnerable state.  Some of this coercion involves the threat of physical violence, some of it involves what has been called “psychological coercion.”

• Exploitation – Trafficking agreements that are free from fraud or coercion might still be thought to be exploitation, insofar as they involve persons in positions of relative power taking unfair advantage of those in positions of vulnerability.  Talk of “economic coercion,” i.e. choosing an intrinsically undesirable option because one’s poverty makes all one’s other options even less attractive, is probably better understood as a worry about exploitation, not coercion per se.

• Indentured Servitude – Sometimes workers are held captive after arriving in the United States until they can pay off their debt to the agent.  Often, indentured servitude and fraud go hand in hand.  But not necessarily.  Are indentured servitude contracts morally objectionable when they do not involve fraud or coercion?

• Sex Work – There sometimes seems to be a presumption in discussions of trafficking that sex work must be coercive, because it is not the kind of work that anyone would do voluntarily.  Is this true?  If not, are there other good reasons to oppose the migration of women into the United States to work in the sex industry?  Laura Maria Agustin has her doubts.

I’m sure there are other issues that I’ve left of the list.  Again, I want to stress that this is an issue that’s new to me.  I have some concerns about what seems to be a lack of concern for important moral distinctions in what little literature I’ve seen on the topic.  I also have some concerns of an empirical nature, regarding the possibly exaggerated extent of the problem.  Finally, I’m puzzled by the fact that so few people point seem to point to more open borders as a significant step toward solving the problem.  But I’m also certain that there are some serious moral abuses in this area that we ought to care and do something about.  I would just like to get a little clearer about what exactly they are.