It is sometimes right to let others do wrong. Sweatshops provide a potential example of particular ethical significance. The argument for this, in brief, runs as follows. Sweatshops pay what many regard as wrongfully exploitative wages—for instance, on one theory of exploitation, wages that represent an unfair share of the social surplus created through sweatshop labor. Nevertheless, many claim that sweatshops benefit workers (at least economically) as these wages are still higher than available alternatives. Combine this with workers’ apparent desire for and consent to sweatshop employment, and we arguably find good reasons not to end or prevent it. Better to let sweatshop workers be wrongfully exploited than to leave them in even more extreme poverty.

There are many controversial assumptions here—not the least of which being the implicit assumption that there are no legitimate ways to convince employers to pay less exploitative wages. For the moment, let these pass. Is the claim that third parties would be right to allow sweatshop employers to act wrongfully even theoretically tenable? Much of the recent business ethics literature suggests not. Theorists with otherwise diverse views have defended or relied on a presumption of parity between first- and third-party obligations: if we shouldn’t stop sweatshop employment, it must not be wrongful; if it is wrongful, we should stop it.

In my recent article in Business Ethics Quarterly, “Wage Exploitation and the Nonworseness Claim: Allowing the Wrong, to Do More Good,” I argued that this is a mistake. There are no “theory-neutral” grounds for requiring such parity, even if we limit ourselves to consequentialism. I argued that three errors undergird this mistake: theorists have failed to adequately distinguish evaluation of outcomes from evaluation of actions; to account for the possibility of multiple competing values; and to appreciate the ethical significance of the fact that different options—both in terms of actions and outcomes—are available to different agents. I concluded that progress in this debate requires more careful distinction of the rightness or wrongness of sweatshop employment from the rightness or wrongness of third-party responses to it.

Applied ethicists understandably seek theoretical simplicity in the face of overwhelming empirical complexity. Unfortunately, focus on idealized case sets and lack of attention to confounding variables—phenomena that seem best explained by a partially blinding hope for universally defensible practical answers—can create the illusion of simplicity. Of course, ethicists aren’t unique here; much of the very economic work drawn on in the sweatshop literature faces similar criticism—worries about theoretical models developed from idealizing assumptions’ being applied to the real world. But one of the particular jobs of philosophy is to guard against this, to begin our theorizing with an appreciation of the complexities of the ethical and empirical landscapes we seek to understand. To this end, I close voicing hope for more collaboration between theoretical and applied ethicists, and for more appreciation from each for the distinctive complexities of the other.

Read the full article ‘Wage Exploitation and the Nonworseness Claim: Allowing the Wrong, To Do More Good‘ published in Business Ethics Quarterly