The forthcoming article “What exploitation is” by Benjamin Ferguson, Peter Hans Matthews, David Ronayne, and Roberto Veneziani is summarized by the author(s) below.
What does it mean to say someone is being exploited? The word is often used in debates about sweatshops, migration, or gig work, but philosophers and social scientists have long disagreed about its precise meaning. Some argue that exploitation is about unfair outcomes—when one side gains much more than the other. Others think it is about power—when one party can disproportionately dictate terms. Some emphasize disrespect or bad luck. But until now, nobody had systematically asked how experts and lay subjects actually apply the concept.
Our study set out to do just that. We surveyed more than 2,000 people—around 550 professional philosophers and 1,500 members of the public. Each person read short scenarios, or vignettes, about everyday transactions (buying and selling mugs), in which we varied key features such as unequal payoffs, market power, unmet basic needs, prior injustice, or disrespectful attitudes. Participants then rated how exploitative each scenario was on a scale from 0 (“not at all”) to 100 (“maximally”). In total, we collected over 23,000 ratings.
The results were striking. First, exploitation is not an empty label: people clearly distinguish exploitative from non-exploitative interactions. In baseline scenarios where both parties benefitted equally and no one had special power, the vast majority rated them as “not at all exploitative.”
Second, both inequality and power matter. When one side gained more, people judged the scenario more exploitative. The same was true when one side had monopoly power. But the real force came when inequality and power were combined: people judged those scenarios as even more exploitative than the sum of either factor alone. In other words, subjects are very likely to apply exploitation when unfair gains and unequal power reinforce one another.
Third, certain background conditions amplify judgments. Exploitation is seen as especially severe when power stems from an injustice. By contrast, disrespectful attitudes or sheer bad luck were much weaker drivers.
Finally, experts and laypeople largely agreed. Both groups of subjects displayed a shared understanding of what makes an interaction exploitative. While philosophers emphasized power slightly more, and the public put more weight on unequal outcomes and disrespect, the similarities between the groups far outweighed the differences.
These findings matter beyond academic theory. They suggest that public concerns about sweatshops, predatory loans, or migrant work are not simply about inequality or coercion alone, but about their interaction—power exercised to secure unfair advantage, often against a backdrop of injustice. The results challenge narrow theories that treat exploitation as either purely distributive or purely about domination, and instead support hybrid accounts that capture both.
By mapping the ordinary meaning of exploitation, our study provides a common foundation for future debates in ethics, politics, and policy. If lawmakers, activists, and employers want to take exploitation seriously, they must attend not just to unequal outcomes or to power imbalances, but to the ways these combine—especially when they leave people with unmet needs or result from prior injustice.
About the Author(s): Benjamin Ferguson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and the director of Warwick’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program, Peter Hans Matthews is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at Middlebury and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland and the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics, David Ronayne is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) Berlin, and Roberto Veneziani is a Professor in Economics at the School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London. Their research “What exploitation is” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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