R:ETRO webinar – Understanding the wrong of exploitation

The third R:ETRO – Reputation, Ethics, Trust, and Relationships at Oxford – webinar of Hilary term 2025, hosted by Rita Mota, Associate Professor in the Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability at Esade Business School, and an International Research Fellow with the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, and Alan Morrison, Intesa Sanpaolo Professor of Business, Ethics and Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. For more on the R:ETRO series, visit www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/research/centres-and-initiatives/oxford-university-centre-corporate-reputation/retro-webinars-reputation-ethics-trust-and-relationships-oxford. Brian Berkey, Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, discusses "Understanding the wrong of exploitation". Abstract: In this talk, Brian argues that the wrong of exploitation is best understood as consisting, most fundamentally, in the extraction by the exploiting party of an unjustifiably large share of the benefits that are produced by economic activity conducted on terms that they have used their bargaining power to secure, in conditions in which they had a positive duty to benefit others by refraining from seeking or accepting benefits of that magnitude. An important feature of this view is that, contrary to the dominant views in the literature, it doesn’t rely on the claim that the exploiter’s transaction partner(s), in particular, are necessarily entitled to a greater share of the benefits than they in fact receive. This view, I claim, has at least three important advantages over rival views. First, it allows us to accept some of the plausible claims made by proponents of the 'nonworseness claim', who often defend the permissibility of intuitively exploitative economic behaviour, without accepting that this behaviour is in fact permissible. Second, it allows us to capture the ways in which, on reflection, many individuals who are not parties to exploitative tran