In Defence of Exploitation

Justin Schwartz

Economics and Philosophy, 1995, vol. 11, issue 2, 275-307

Abstract: Roemer has a striking and novel criticism of Marx's thesis that capitalism is exploitative. Even if so, Roemer claims, that does not establish that it is morally objectionable. He argues from idealized models that involve what he calls ‘Marxian exploitation’, but do not have the consequences which, he says, Marxists think make exploitation bad – domination, alienation, and inequality – or have them only in unobjectionable ways. These models, Roemer thinks, show that the moral problem with capitalism that Marxian exploitation locates only imperfectly is unjust inequality. He develops an alternative notion of ‘property relations exploitation’, based on this charge, to replace the morally uninteresting notion of Marxian exploitation in assessing arguments for socialism.

Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:11:y:1995:i:02:p:275-307_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics and Philosophy from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().