Debunking Exploitation

The paradox of exploitation emerges from the contradiction between the reasonable view that some consensual, mutually beneficial transactions can nonetheless impermissible and the non-worseness claim, which holds that no mutually beneficial transaction can be worse than its absence. This paper dissolves the tension by attacking the intuition on which the reasonable view rests. I argue that this intuition is best explained as an adaptive response to the collective action problems of hunter-gatherer economies, where ill-defined property rights made egalitarian sharing norms essential for cooperative survival. Emerging for reasons independent of its capacity to track moral truth, the intuition carries no evidential weight in economic ethics. I further vindicate non-worseness by showing it lacks any plausible adaptive explanation. Debunking the fairness intuition removes the sole basis for the Reasonable view and dissolves the exploitation problem, while providing a novel application of local evolutionary debunking arguments to economic ethics.