Exploitative practices, such as “sweatshop” employment, commercial surrogacy and organ sale, are pervasive in today’s global economy and the subject of a growing philosophical debate. This debate mainly concerns why it is morally wrong to exploit somebody when they voluntarily agree to and benefit from the exchange. However, while focusing on appraising the exploiter’s conduct, philosophers have not seriously considered why, from the exploited party’s perspective, it is bad or harmful to be exploited. The purpose of the project is to fill this gap.

Our main thesis is that the exploited party suffers relational harm, that is, harm to their standing as an equal in relation to others. This is the case even when they gain from exploitation in other ways. To develop and defend this thesis we draw on recent work on relational equality in political philosophy. To ensure our arguments have real-world relevance we examine the case of gig work, a practice often criticized for being exploitative.

Further, we show that grasping how exploitation harms allows progress to be made on three other philosophical questions about exploitation: First, what makes exploitation morally wrong? Second, is it worse to exploit or to neglect people in need when exploitation is voluntary and benefits them? Third, how is exploitation linked to structural injustice? In this way, the project makes a broad and ground-breaking contribution to exploitation theory and the study of real-world exploitative practices.