• Colonialism and Territorial Rights
    In Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, Routledge. pp. 401-413. 2022.
    A common understanding of what was wrong with colonialism was that it involved the theft of land and resources from indigenous peoples, accompanied in most cases by flagrant violations of rights to their bodily integrity. It is therefore natural to assume that libertarianism is theoretically well equipped to account for these wrongs. In this chapter I argue that although this assumption about libertarianism’s ability to condemn colonialism is correct, the path to this verdict is not as straightf…Read more
  • Introduction
    In Benjamin Ferguson & Matt Zwolinski (eds.), Exploitation: perspectives from philosophy, politics, and economics, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-9. forthcoming.
    Exploitation: Perspectives from Philosophy, Politics, and Economics brings together recent work on the topic of exploitation from philosophy, political science, and economics in one volume, organized around three main questions: What is exploitation? Why is exploitation wrong? What should we do about it? These questions are increasingly relevant in public policy discussions. The past decade has witnessed the rise of populism and an increasing sense that politics is a game rigged to benefit certa…Read more
  • Introduction
    with Matt Zwolinski
    In Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, Routledge. pp. 1-9. 2022.
    Strict libertarianism, as one of us has defined it elsewhere, is “a radical political view which holds that individual liberty, understood as the absence of interference with a person’s body and rightfully acquired property, is a moral absolute or near-absolute, and that the only governmental activities consistent with that liberty are (if any) those necessary to protect individuals from aggression by others.” Strict libertarianism is a radicalized form of classical liberalism that is, character…Read more
  •  26
    This book brings together recent work on the topic of exploitation from philosophy, political science, and economics in one volume, organised around three main questions: what is exploitation?, why is exploitation wrong?, and what should we do about it? These questions are increasingly relevant in public policy discussions. The past decade has witnessed the rise of populism and an increasing sense that politics is a game rigged to benefit certain classes of persons at the expense of others. Inte…Read more
  •  51
    Exploitation
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.
  •  23
    The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (edited book)
    with Matt Zwolinski
    Routledge. 2022.
    This handbook is the first definitive reference on libertarianism that offers an in-depth survey of the central ideas from across philosophy, politics and economics, including applications to contemporary policy issues.
  •  38
    Territorial rights and colonial wrongs
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (2): 425-446. 2020.
    European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  43
    We argue that permissibility-based solutions to the paradox of supererogation encounter a nested dilemma. Such approaches solve the paradox by distinguishing moral and rational permissions. If they do not also include a bridge condition that relates these two permissions, then they violate a very plausible monotonicity condition. If they do include a bridge condition, then permissibility-based solutions either amount to rational satisficing or they collapse back into the classical account of sup…Read more
  •  81
    Are we all exploiters?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3): 535-546. 2020.
    This paper argues that two single-factor accounts of exploitation are inadequate and instead defends a two-factor account. Purely distributive accounts of exploitation, which equate exploitation with unfair transaction, make exploitation pervasive and cannot deliver the intuition that exploiters are blameworthy. Recent, non-distributive alternatives, which make unfairness unnecessary for exploitation, largely avoid these problems, but their arguments for the non-necessity of unfairness are uncon…Read more
  •  48
    Why Buy Local?
    with Christopher Thompson
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (1): 104-120. 2021.
    This article critically assesses the moral arguments that speak in favour of three consumer options: buying local food, buying global (non‐local) food, and buying global food while also purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate the environmental impact of food transportation. We argue that because the offsetting option allows one to provide economic benefits to the poorest food workers while also mitigating the environmental impact of food transportation it is morally superior to the alternatives.
  •  14
    Virtues, Consequences, and the Market
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 13 (1). 2020.
  •  30
    The Paradox of Exploitation: A New Solution
    Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science. 2013.
    In this thesis I present a rights-based theory of exploitation. I argue that successful conceptions of exploitation should begin with the ordinary language claim that exploitation involves `taking unfair advantage'. Consequently, they must combine an account of what it means to take advantage of another with an account of when transactions are unfair. Existing conceptions of exploitation fail to provide adequate accounts of both aspects of exploitation. Hillel Steiner and John Roemer provide co…Read more
  •  1
    Exploitation
    Oxford Research Encyclopedia in Politics. 2018.
  •  2
    Exploitation
    with Hillel Steiner
    In Serena Olsaretti (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice. pp. 533-555. 2018.
  • Exploitation and Labour
    In Eugene Heath, Byron Kaldis & Alexei M. Marcoux (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics, Routledge. pp. 490-505. 2018.
  •  9
    Exploitation
    Economics and Philosophy 34 (3): 291-294. 2018.
    The notion of exploitation is prominent in political discourse and policy debates. It is central in analyses of labour relations, especially focusing on the weakest segments of the labour force including women and children. It features in controversies on surrogate motherhood, and on drug-testing and the price of life-saving drugs, especially in developing countries.
  •  21
    Exploitation and the Social Economy
    Review of Social Economy 77 (2): 91-92. 2019.
  •  196
    Betterness of permissibility
    Philosophical Studies 177 (9): 2451-2469. 2020.
    It is often assumed that morally permissible acts are morally better than impermissible acts. We call this claim Betterness of Permissibility. Yet, we show that some striking counterexamples show that the claim’s truth cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, even if Betterness of Permissibility is true, it is unclear why. Apart from appeals to its intuitive plausibility, no arguments in favour of the condition exist. We fill this lacuna by identifying two fundamental conditions that jointly en…Read more
  •  561
    Sweatshops and Consumer Choices
    Economics and Philosophy 34 (3): 295-315. 2018.
    We consider a case where consumers are faced with a choice between sweatshop-produced clothing and identical clothing produced in high-income countries. We argue that it is morally better for consumers to purchase clothing produced in sweatshops and then to compensate sweatshop workers for the difference between their actual wage and a fair wage than it is for them either to purchase the sweatshop clothing without this compensatory transfer or to purchase clothing produced in high-income countri…Read more
  •  91
    Kant on duty in the groundwork
    Res Publica 18 (4): 303-319. 2012.
    Barbara Herman offers an interpretation of Kant's Groundwork on which an action has moral worth if the primary motive for the action is the motive of duty. She offers this approach in place of Richard Henson's sufficiency-based interpretation, according to which an action has moral worth when the motive of duty is sufficient by itself to generate the action. Noa Latham criticizes Herman's account and argues that we cannot make sense of the position that an agent can hold multiple motives for act…Read more
  •  23
    On Love’s Robustness
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (4): 915-925. 2018.
    Recently Philip Pettit has claimed that attachment, virtue, and respect are robust goods. Robust goods require not only the actual provision of certain associated ‘thin’ goods, but also the modally robust provision of these thin goods across a range of counterfactual situations. I focus my attention on Pettit’s account of the robust good of love, which, for Pettit, is the modally robust provision of care. I argue Pettit’s account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for love. In …Read more
  •  22
    Can libertarians get away with fraud?
    Economics and Philosophy 34 (2): 165-184. 2018.
    :In this paper I argue that libertarianism neither prohibits exchanges in which consent is gained through deceit, nor does it entail that such exchanges are morally invalid. However, contra James Child’s similar claim, that it is incapable of delivering these verdicts, I argue that libertarianscanclaim that exchanges involving deceitfully obtained consent are morally invalid by appealing to an external theory of moral permissibility.
  •  25
    The Value of Robustness: Promotion or Protection?
    Moral Philosophy and Politics 5 (1): 9-27. 2018.
    Philip Pettit has argued that the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect are robust goods in the sense that they require both the actual provision of certain benefits and the modally robust provision of these benefits. He also claims that we value the robustness of these goods because it diminishes our vulnerability to others. I question whether robustness really reduces vulnerability and argue that even if it does, vulnerability reduction is not the reason we value robustness. In place of Pet…Read more
  •  141
    The Paradox of Exploitation
    Erkenntnis 81 (5): 951-972. 2016.
    The concept of exploitation brings many of our ordinary moral intuitions into conflict. Exploitation—or to use the commonly accepted ordinary language definition, taking unfair advantage—is often thought to be morally impermissible. In order to be permissible, transactions must not be unfair. The claim that engaging in mutually beneficial transactions is morally better than not transacting is also quite compelling. However, when combined with the claim that morally permissible transactions are b…Read more
  •  89
    Exploitation and disadvantage
    Economics and Philosophy 32 (3): 485-509. 2016.
    According to some accounts of exploitation, most notably Ruth Sample’s degradation-based account and Robert Goodin’s vulnerability-based account, exploitation occurs when an advantaged party fails to constrain their advantage in light of another’s disadvantage, regardless of the cause of this disadvantage. Because the duty of constraint in these accounts does not depend on the cause of the disadvantage, the advantaged’s duty of constraint is what I call a ‘come-what-may’ duty. I show that come-w…Read more