Exploitation without Responsibility: Sweatshops

Abstract

It is commonly argued that workers in developing countries are exploited by western multinational corporations. Developing countries are often the victim of longstanding, deep and massively destructive injustice. Different accounts on exploitation are in disagreement about whether these injustices should play a role in evaluating charges of exploitation. This thesis tries to understand what obligations, if any, we can derive from the different accounts on exploitation. It argues that while we need to include the background conditions in which exchanges take place, we can’t directly derive moral responsibilities from them and therefore have to supplement these with a different kind of responsibility.