Good question. I have my own opinions, but I’d be more interested in hearing what reasons you can come up with (and any counterarguments you have to them), so I’m gonna challenge you to do that while slogging through all my disorganized brain droppings.
My biggest issue with “let people be exploited if they want” is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If the world was two people, one who seeks to exploit and the other who seeks to be exploited, then I don’t really care; in our world, it’s a bad basis for society to allow for injustice simply because people can be convinced to want it.
In such a world, the exploiters (whether individuals or organizations) would seek to control whatever systems of education, media, and ideology they could to convince as many people as possible that being exploited is good for them. This would allow for them to centralize power, and that power would enforce a class divide; anyone who didn’t exploit others would be relegated to being one of the exploited class, anyone who willingly exploited others but didn’t work to convert more into “wanting to be exploited” would never amass as much power as those that do.
Besides the perverse incentives, that division would create a power imbalance that attracts (into the positions of authority) individuals and groups who are both indoctrinated into the system, and more efficient at subjugating others. That means there is a filter naturally built into any such system that selects for people who view others more as statistics and resources than people with inherent value, and are skilled at both convincing them to want exploitation and exploiting them.
Being the real world, people will not be perfect, so any lack of skill in one domain will require compensation in the other. If someone cannot be convinced to be exploited willingly, the authority will need to find other ways of enforcing exploitation.
Lifeforms being how they are, not all of them will be brainwashable; that means oppression will be necessary, as dissent is a threat to the amount of power an authority has amassed and imposes “soft” limits on how much power can be amassed—that is, limitations that can be overcome with enough effort (as opposed to physical limitations like the total amount of living beings). And any threat to the power imbalance is a threat to the system itself, a threat to the society.
We have thus specified a system that selects for abusers and oppressors in positions of power, without once having to speculate that unjust and cruel people would begin in such positions.
Now one might claim I’m just using a slippery-slope fallacy, that we might be able to specify such a society that accounts for the aforementioned flaws, and implements some sort of system of checks-and-balances to keep from the balance shifting so egregiously. And to that, I want to point out how any such system constitutes an aforementioned “soft” limit on power, but does not remove the incentives at the core of the system.
Meanwhile, in a just society, anyone who wants to be exploited and anyone who wants to exploit are given the knowledge and resources necessary to overcome such primal desires. Maybe they are educated, or maybe given safely contained environments—e.g. VR, or LARP, or BDSM—to exercise their desires without negatively impacting others/society.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is some naturally-arising desire to be exploited. Put another way: assuming a perfectly just society, whence comes the desire to be exploited?
and this is what i don’t get. if somebody likes being exploited, then why not let them?
Good question. I have my own opinions, but I’d be more interested in hearing what reasons you can come up with (and any counterarguments you have to them), so I’m gonna challenge you to do that while slogging through all my disorganized brain droppings.
My biggest issue with “let people be exploited if they want” is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If the world was two people, one who seeks to exploit and the other who seeks to be exploited, then I don’t really care; in our world, it’s a bad basis for society to allow for injustice simply because people can be convinced to want it.
In such a world, the exploiters (whether individuals or organizations) would seek to control whatever systems of education, media, and ideology they could to convince as many people as possible that being exploited is good for them. This would allow for them to centralize power, and that power would enforce a class divide; anyone who didn’t exploit others would be relegated to being one of the exploited class, anyone who willingly exploited others but didn’t work to convert more into “wanting to be exploited” would never amass as much power as those that do.
Besides the perverse incentives, that division would create a power imbalance that attracts (into the positions of authority) individuals and groups who are both indoctrinated into the system, and more efficient at subjugating others. That means there is a filter naturally built into any such system that selects for people who view others more as statistics and resources than people with inherent value, and are skilled at both convincing them to want exploitation and exploiting them.
Being the real world, people will not be perfect, so any lack of skill in one domain will require compensation in the other. If someone cannot be convinced to be exploited willingly, the authority will need to find other ways of enforcing exploitation.
Lifeforms being how they are, not all of them will be brainwashable; that means oppression will be necessary, as dissent is a threat to the amount of power an authority has amassed and imposes “soft” limits on how much power can be amassed—that is, limitations that can be overcome with enough effort (as opposed to physical limitations like the total amount of living beings). And any threat to the power imbalance is a threat to the system itself, a threat to the society.
We have thus specified a system that selects for abusers and oppressors in positions of power, without once having to speculate that unjust and cruel people would begin in such positions.
Now one might claim I’m just using a slippery-slope fallacy, that we might be able to specify such a society that accounts for the aforementioned flaws, and implements some sort of system of checks-and-balances to keep from the balance shifting so egregiously. And to that, I want to point out how any such system constitutes an aforementioned “soft” limit on power, but does not remove the incentives at the core of the system.
Meanwhile, in a just society, anyone who wants to be exploited and anyone who wants to exploit are given the knowledge and resources necessary to overcome such primal desires. Maybe they are educated, or maybe given safely contained environments—e.g. VR, or LARP, or BDSM—to exercise their desires without negatively impacting others/society.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is some naturally-arising desire to be exploited. Put another way: assuming a perfectly just society, whence comes the desire to be exploited?