>Because ethical considerations that treat each party as an autonomous agent are satisfied.
Autonomy isn't the only concern in moral actions (see cases of exploitation where autonomy is respected), and it's certainly not the only concern in justice - the capabilities approach recognizes autonomy, but it also recognizes it is bounded by structural factors outside the individual's control.
>Thats your opinion, when you're the one writing the checks, you get to decide what size to make them.
That's beside the point, though. The market (the actors within it) does not, in many cases, produce just outcomes. At the sight of an unjust desert, telling someone that they can decide to be just if only they were in that position is irrelevant to the issue of desert that has already occurred. Unless your position is that every result is deserved (which seems very hard to defend), there's room for more than one subjective opinion, and me writing one check won't fix it.
>In a free market, when each party has the ability to terminate the relationship, then both parties are equally powerful in their ability to walk away.
Each party has the ability; in many cases, only one has the capability. It's a structural issue with many employers and a far greater number of employees. Something being mutually beneficial or a Pereto improvement doesn't motivate me at all, because even mutually beneficial arrangements can be exploitative.
>Yes and the employee has the capacity to make much more money because of their access to capital that they aren't responsible for
This is irrelevant to bargaining power; the employee can barter with his skills, of course, but not if they're replacable (at a low cost or otherwise).
>Its unclear to me why you would even be in a position to tell two parties that their mutual employment transaction was exploitation without knowing the specifics.
I agree, but the definition of exploitation as generally agreed upon or argued for is not "subjective". I'm not sure what the two parties or their mutual employment has to do with whether or not there is exploitation.
>sleight-of-hand about calling employment "slavery" and chattering on and on about being forced to toil in a factory on some fatcat's toolroom lathe
You're right, I don't think it's slavery or comparable to slavery. I think capitalism is a massive improvement on feudalism and on sharecropping.
>and when you point out that lathe operator is a skilled job making well over a living wage
Most exploitation-theorists would say the wage is in many cases irrelevant. It being a skilled job isn't that important. The issue is employment in cases where bargaining power is low (structurally or caused by an actor). Starvation is only the worst case.
>without allowing them the basic human right of deciding how much their labor is worth.
They don't decide that, it's "decided" by the market - and by extension society in general. I'm also not sure why it would be a human right to decide that. You can make all the decisions you want - and someone with more power can override them. If I dedide my labour is worth $100k, I'm laughed out of every office I step into. What use is the right?
>Its just a biological/physical set of facts that you want to stay alive, you need to eat to stay alive, and someone has to make the food.
By this metric there is no such thing as a "need". That's ridiculous, or I'm misinterpreting you.
>In a planned economy, only those with the planners' permission can make food.
I don't argue for a planned economy (in the traditional sense; I'm still working out my thoughts), but this isn't really true in the Marxian idea of a "planned economy".
> Autonomy isn't the only concern in moral actions (see cases of exploitation where autonomy is respected), and it's certainly not the only concern in justice - the capabilities approach recognizes autonomy, but it also recognizes it is bounded by structural factors outside the individual's control.
You're free to form whatever opinions you like; the autonomy of other human beings is a grundnorm that is either respected because its a human right, or violated because the violator has some value they wish to impose on other humans who don't share that value.
> That's beside the point, though. The market (the actors within it) does not, in many cases, produce just outcomes.
Perhaps I would agree. Thats still an agreement between persons about the affairs of others. It would be more unjust to interfere in the affairs of consenting, autonomous adults because we didn't like their preferences.
> Each party has the ability; in many cases, only one has the capability.
Thats why I specified free market. In a free market, by definition, parties are free to choose or decline to transact.
> It's a structural issue with many employers and a far greater number of employees.
To the extent that is true, it is because of things that limit the spread of capital and reduce marginal profitability.
> Something being mutually beneficial or a Pereto improvement doesn't motivate me at all, because even mutually beneficial arrangements can be exploitative.
You're going to have to explain why I would care that you think something is exploitation. A Pareto improvement means the parties to the transactions both improved their status, your opinion is not even relevant.
> This is irrelevant to bargaining power; the employee can barter with his skills, of course, but not if they're replacable (at a low cost or otherwise).
Of course, and with easily replaceable skills I'm at a loss as to why you think he would be entitled to a stronger bargaining position.
> I agree, but the definition of exploitation as generally agreed upon or argued for is not "subjective".
The generally agreed upon definition of exploitation certainly doesn't include employment in a first world country.
> The issue is employment in cases where bargaining power is low (structurally or caused by an actor). Starvation is only the worst case.
This is created by restricting barriers to ownership of capital so there aren't competing employers.
> They don't decide that, it's "decided" by the market
The market isn't a thing, its just what we call the emergent decisions of all the market participants. The worker decides what his wage is worth when he agrees to sell it.
> I'm also not sure why it would be a human right to decide that.
Because its a grundnorm. Slavery offends the morality of all decent people.
> You can make all the decisions you want - and someone with more power can override them. If I dedide my labour is worth $100k, I'm laughed out of every office I step into.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. I'm suggesting that social norms that respect the autonomy of people are the ethical ones. Of course someone with power can steal your tools or your warehouse of products. That would be a scenario where my autonomy wasn't respected. If your labor is worth $100k a year and no one wants it for that, then oh well. Maybe it's not really worth that much? If its worth that much to you then don't work. But if you want to live and eat and can't make the wage that you want, well maybe your desires are larger than your entitlement.
> What use is the right?
It would be a prerequisite to the demand.
> By this metric there is no such thing as a "need". That's ridiculous, or I'm misinterpreting you.
Needs are contingent on goals. Given no goals, one needs nothing.
> Marxian idea of a "planned economy".
The left is collectively engaged in a process of pushing authoritarianism while claiming anarchism and it's not really helping the working people with their struggle to survive, when all these people enable corporate dystopia by inviting known-to-be-corrupt politicians to collude with corporations in writing regulations that suppress competition, consumers' rights, and the working class. Marxians should probably read more Marx.
>the autonomy of other human beings is a grundnorm that is either respected because its a human right
There are good critiques of the concept and value of autonomy, and to what degree we have autonomy (beyond the metaphysical sense) in a capitalist market. Also, I'm not saying autonomy is irrelevant, I'm saying it's not the only thing that's relevant. Morality entails more than respecting autonomy.
>It would be more unjust to interfere in the affairs of consenting, autonomous adults because we didn't like their preferences.
I mostly agree, but there is a strand of libertarianism which would argue such interference is permissible if it comes in the form of soft power (advertising, taking certain products off the market, etc.)
>You're going to have to explain why I would care that you think something is exploitation.
The point is that you don't have to care for it to be exploitation. You don't have to care that 2+2=4, but we structure our science around the mathematical principles that lead to that result anyway. You don't have to care that murder (for example) is wrong, and the murderer doesn't have to care that murder is impermissible.
>Of course, and with easily replaceable skills I'm at a loss as to why you think he would be entitled to a stronger bargaining position.
Perhaps not individually, but as a general trend in society it leads to a mass of people being in poor positions to bargain and a smaller number of people being in very good positions. I don't think that's a good thing, because it leads (very realistically) to some being at the mercy (speaking in terms of resources required to live or sustain a family) of others by virtue of factors beyond their control. That restricts autonomy beyond the economic sphere.
>This is created by restricting barriers to ownership of capital so there aren't competing employers.
I've already mentioned the concept of the local maximum in employment; even if there are multiple reasonable options for employment all options are possible, it does not follow that any will be good options.
>But if you want to live and eat and can't make the wage that you want, well maybe your desires are larger than your entitlement.
This is the just-world fallacy; the market, as already clarified, does not necessarily produce just outcomes, and it's unclear why it should be thought it does. Why does the market decide my entitlement? Should it, speaking in terms of economic systems, decide my entitlement? For slaves, their masters decided their entitlement. Now it's a market which was created by a set of laws and property rights, and maintained as such. Is it really beyond question?
>It would be a prerequisite to the demand.
The demand is useless if nobody will agree to it.
>Needs are contingent on goals. Given no goals, one needs nothing.
Sure, I have a "goal to survive", but this seems to cheapen both the concept of goals in a goods economy and the idea of survival which supercedes all other goals to the point of being a biological impulse we are prepared to kill for. It's lower than any psychology or even any other need. It's a physical process. When we say somebody has no goals, we don't assume they are just okay with dying and would be apathetic if we killed them.
>The left is collectively engaged in a process of pushing authoritarianism while claiming anarchism
Perhaps we have different ideas of authority and anarchism. Besides that, Marx was clear that socialists should not rationally support non-socialist platforms, which I agree with to a large extent. The labourer and the capitalist have opposing interests (speaking class-wise). Better wages were never on the Marxist agenda.
> There are good critiques of the concept and value of autonomy, and to what degree we have autonomy (beyond the metaphysical sense) in a capitalist market. Also, I'm not saying autonomy is irrelevant, I'm saying it's not the only thing that's relevant. Morality entails more than respecting autonomy.
So that's the hurdle you need to cross in order to justify measures which violate other people's autonomy. You have to explain why it's ok to interfere in the relations between two consenting parties in order to impose your own values on people who do not share them.
> The point is that you don't have to care for it to be exploitation.
I'm asking you why it's a bad thing to have relations that you consider to be exploitation. Exploitation is a value-laden characterization, its not an objective feature of a relationship.
> Perhaps not individually, but as a general trend in society it leads to a mass of people being in poor positions to bargain and a smaller number of people being in very good positions.
"Less to offer == poorer negotiating position" is not a trend in society, but an identity that arises from the nature of negotiations.
> I don't think that's a good thing, because it leads (very realistically) to some being at the mercy (speaking in terms of resources required to live or sustain a family) of others by virtue of factors beyond their control.
The fact that someone needs resources to live is a brute fact of reality and applies to all systems. Aside from that, markets are an efficient method of allocating scarce resources and abandoning markets because of scarcity is like jumping off a bridge because you hate heights.
> I've already mentioned the concept of the local maximum in employment; even if there are multiple reasonable options for employment all options are possible, it does not follow that any will be good options.
No, just the best options available given material and social constraints.
> This is the just-world fallacy; the market, as already clarified, does not necessarily produce just outcomes, and it's unclear why it should be thought it does.
Because the market is a means for allocating scarce resources and unrestricted market transactions are Pareto improvements. Its not a fallacy to observe that a world with more justice is a more just world than a world with less justice.
> Why does the market decide my entitlement? Should it, speaking in terms of economic systems, decide my entitlement?
Because the market is not a thing-in-itself but a label we give to the collective actions of market participants, and your entitlement in the market is created by obtaining things in transactions with people who want to transact with you. If you don't care about ethics, then you don't care about entitlements. If you care about ethics, then you can see how you wouldn't be able to become entitled to something without the owner transferring the title to you, or coming into possession of unowned property.
> For slaves, their masters decided their entitlement. Now it's a market which was created by a set of laws and property rights, and maintained as such. Is it really beyond question?
Nothing is beyond question. Mutually reciprocal norms arise from a desire to avoid violence and a desire for the best deal possible. Arguments which challenge the equal rights of all human beings but do so obliquely are suspect so I'll ask you to proceed with this questioning.
> The demand is useless if nobody will agree to it.
When people don't agree to something but someone forces it on them we usually call it unethical.
> Sure, I have a "goal to survive", but this seems to cheapen both the concept of goals in a goods economy and the idea of survival which supercedes all other goals to the point of being a biological impulse we are prepared to kill for. It's lower than any psychology or even any other need. It's a physical process. When we say somebody has no goals, we don't assume they are just okay with dying and would be apathetic if we killed them.
This might be persuasive if humans were unable to choose goals that conflict with continued survival. Also characterizing the human need for food in order to survive and the economic need for a means of selling one's labor into one concept is misleading, as if one starves to death the moment one is fired or quits their job. Sure, you need a job. Just like the capitalist needs someone to work in his factory. After all, it is both of your livelihoods. Just don't presume that either of your needs is more important than another human being's freedom to decline a transaction.
> The labourer and the capitalist have opposing interests (speaking class-wise).
This is a Marxist fallacy which has caused an inestimable amount of sorrow. Individuals have interests, classes do not.
> Better wages were never on the Marxist agenda.
Yet self-proclaimed Marxists advocate for increasing the minimum wage. Hence my admonition to read more Marx.
>Exploitation is a value-laden characterization, its not an objective feature of a relationship.
We can think of what characterizes exploitation using what we already know and our intuitions of what is and isn't exploitative. If a relationship fulfills those characteristics, we can say it's an exploitative relationship.
>Aside from that, markets are an efficient method of allocating scarce resources
This may be true, but there's no reason to think it's the most efficient, nor is there reason to think efficiency is the only goal that an economy (built for and by humans for human ends) should have.
>Because the market is a means for allocating scarce resources and unrestricted market transactions are Pareto improvements.
I don't care about Pareto improvements, I asked about justice. No philosopher (or anyone, really) defines justice with only the idea of goods allocation or Pareto improvement in mind.
>Because the market is not a thing-in-itself but a label we give to the collective actions of market participants
This is tautological; the market is ... actions of market participants. You outlined my entitlement in the market but didn't make a case as to why the market should manage such entitlements for everyone, especially under the fact that it is nigh-impossible to abstain from the market (or taxes, take your pick).
Besides this, I don't really buy the idea that the market is simply "collective actions" - a space in which to create those actions must be made with private property laws and the protection of that property. Resources must be accumulated, sometimes by colonization. People and must be brought into the market, by force if necessary, by enclosure. The collective actions of buying, selling, and valuing are taught by other market participants to children. It's an institution, and one which (in its global form) highly historically specific - and just as goods are made by people, not handed like mana from heaven, markets were too, and our collective actions reproduce those market relations. Should those relations not be reproduced in a country for but a week, its market would collapse. I think this paper says it best:
"Hayek’s observations on the nature of social evolution and spontaneous order are
insightful and profound when used as a descriptive scheme for understanding how
social institutions grow and change, but they do not convert effectively into
normative guides. A wise lawmaker or judge seeking to follow Hayekian prescriptions is left with a vague and contradictory set of precepts. On one hand, it is
unwise to alter long-standing social institutions by implementing rational abstractions of justice, but, on the other, it is necessary to do so because not all social
orders that have spontaneously evolved are just ones. If the lawmaker or judge
acts to alter a social institution, that action may be condemned as rationalistic
constructivism when viewed at close range, but will appear as one experiment
undertaken in the whole process of spontaneous order when viewed as part of
the bustling dynamism of society as a whole. Spontaneous order is therefore in
the eye of the beholder." (https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_01_1_sandefur.pdf)
>Mutually reciprocal norms arise from a desire to avoid violence and a desire for the best deal possible.
That may be true, but it's a historical and anthropological question as to whether this is how capitalism arose, and whether it is practiced in such a way today. Even philosophers sympathetic to libertarianism note the multiplier effect of injustices longer in the past which accrue as present injustices - and right-libertarians typically have no answer as to how to solve this.
>I'll ask you to proceed with this questioning.
I'm unconvinced that a rights-based account is the most just option for society's flourishing and indeed the flourishing of most individuals. I don't think the right to private property or the right to employ waged labourers has a sufficient case made for it, given that it results in widespread exploitation. The plight of the majority of the population needing to sell their labour-time to survive is failed by a rights-based account which can only say "you can employ people too, it's a right, you know!".
>This is a Marxist fallacy which has caused an inestimable amount of sorrow. Individuals have interests, classes do not.
Classes absolutely do have interests, and just as the market may demonstrate that product X sells at price Y through the collective actions of buyers and sellers, those same collective actions and bargaining which pulls like a tug-of-war rope between labour and capital continuously shows itself, whether at Google or in a coal mine or in a new minimum wage law. Society (and by extension classes) produce people and imbue them with position and skills. A child is born into a societal grouping before he or she is even individuated. Individuals have interests - and those are typically a superset containing class interests.
>Yet self-proclaimed Marxists advocate for increasing the minimum wage.
To be in line with Marx they'd do so in a parliamentary system only under the banner of a socialist party - and it's reasonable to think that Marxists tend to support socialist parties.
Autonomy isn't the only concern in moral actions (see cases of exploitation where autonomy is respected), and it's certainly not the only concern in justice - the capabilities approach recognizes autonomy, but it also recognizes it is bounded by structural factors outside the individual's control.
>Thats your opinion, when you're the one writing the checks, you get to decide what size to make them.
That's beside the point, though. The market (the actors within it) does not, in many cases, produce just outcomes. At the sight of an unjust desert, telling someone that they can decide to be just if only they were in that position is irrelevant to the issue of desert that has already occurred. Unless your position is that every result is deserved (which seems very hard to defend), there's room for more than one subjective opinion, and me writing one check won't fix it.
>In a free market, when each party has the ability to terminate the relationship, then both parties are equally powerful in their ability to walk away.
Each party has the ability; in many cases, only one has the capability. It's a structural issue with many employers and a far greater number of employees. Something being mutually beneficial or a Pereto improvement doesn't motivate me at all, because even mutually beneficial arrangements can be exploitative.
>Yes and the employee has the capacity to make much more money because of their access to capital that they aren't responsible for
This is irrelevant to bargaining power; the employee can barter with his skills, of course, but not if they're replacable (at a low cost or otherwise).
>Its unclear to me why you would even be in a position to tell two parties that their mutual employment transaction was exploitation without knowing the specifics.
I agree, but the definition of exploitation as generally agreed upon or argued for is not "subjective". I'm not sure what the two parties or their mutual employment has to do with whether or not there is exploitation.
>sleight-of-hand about calling employment "slavery" and chattering on and on about being forced to toil in a factory on some fatcat's toolroom lathe
You're right, I don't think it's slavery or comparable to slavery. I think capitalism is a massive improvement on feudalism and on sharecropping.
>and when you point out that lathe operator is a skilled job making well over a living wage
Most exploitation-theorists would say the wage is in many cases irrelevant. It being a skilled job isn't that important. The issue is employment in cases where bargaining power is low (structurally or caused by an actor). Starvation is only the worst case.
>without allowing them the basic human right of deciding how much their labor is worth.
They don't decide that, it's "decided" by the market - and by extension society in general. I'm also not sure why it would be a human right to decide that. You can make all the decisions you want - and someone with more power can override them. If I dedide my labour is worth $100k, I'm laughed out of every office I step into. What use is the right?
>Its just a biological/physical set of facts that you want to stay alive, you need to eat to stay alive, and someone has to make the food.
By this metric there is no such thing as a "need". That's ridiculous, or I'm misinterpreting you.
>In a planned economy, only those with the planners' permission can make food.
I don't argue for a planned economy (in the traditional sense; I'm still working out my thoughts), but this isn't really true in the Marxian idea of a "planned economy".