Sweatshops, Harm and Exploitation: A Proposal to Operationalise the Model of Structural Injustice

Abstract

In this article, I firstly discuss the person-affecting view of harm, distinguishing between the liability and the structural models of responsibility, and also explaining why it is unsatisfactory, from a moral point of view, to interpret a given harm as a loss with respect to a diachronic baseline. Then, I take sweatshops as an example and I entertain two further issues that are related to the assessment of harm and that are necessary for operationalising a comprehensive model of responsibility, that takes into account both liability and structural injustice. The first one is how to interpret harm when it is coexistent with a diachronic benefit and/or the parties involved in the social structures leading to harm seek to unload their responsibility by hiding behind a cooperative deadlock. The second one is how far along the chain of actions leading to harm can structural responsibility be extended.

The Failure of Roy Bhaskar's Explanatory Critique

“…Sweatshops are institutions in which workers are faced with demanding labor, long hours, and “wages that fall below a living wage standard” (Snyder, 2010, p. 187). Although sweatshops have their defenders (Kristof, 2009; Kristof & WuDunn, 2000), many argue that sweatshops are exploitative and immoral (Arnold & Bowie, 2003; Corvino, 2020; Hartsock & Roark, 2019; Mezzadri, 2017; Van Natta, 1995). Let us suppose here that sweatshops are indeed exploitative and immoral.…”