Exploitation

is exploitation, in fact, worse than taking no action to help in the face of human suffering?

Well, I have argued that it is not along with similar framing to yours here. I don't think anyone really comes out and says "yes, letting someone starve is worse than selling them food at a high price all things being equal." Being that exploitation is widely agreed to be better than inaction prima facie, I think there is some burden on people opposing exploitative transactions to (a) show the transaction is based on asymmetrical information to such an extent that the transaction would not have been made without deception, (b) the specific exploiter in question employs threats or causes the initial misfortune, or (c) challenge the premise and argue that letting someone starve is better than selling them food at a high price, all things being equal. It is puzzling to me that people would levy the charge of exploitation without specifying whether their angle is (a), (b), or (c), when it seems rather obvious to me that one of those is required for exploitation to be a charge against someone in the first place.

Doctors profit off of human suffering, so arguably they are exploiting people, but I haven't seen anyone argue that this makes them evil. If the capitalist is really the starving person's only option to avoid starving, then they're like a doctor and providing similar value. If the choice isn't between work and poverty, then it seems to me the capitalist isn't exploiting them at all.

Hierarchy or pecking order is the basis of society and progress, it's either that, continual anarchy or general apathy.

Exploitation is the norm.

Ultimately, survival and procreation dictates...Though in a so called civilized society we dress it up somewhat differently.

You just focus upon what by todays standards is generally regarded as more extreme exploitation.

Whereas any relationship requires A exploiting B or B exploiting A or both exploiting each others weaknesses...Though invariably one will dominate more or less subtly...Whereas a clash of egos will tend towards a more or less aggressive breakdown in cooperation.

That is why society has laws to protect the weak and exploited.

this definition would include, say, the owner of a Somalian sweatshop who pays his workers in pennies because he knows a Somali single mother of 5 is desperate enough for work to accept his terms

I agree, and paying low wages is preferable to doing nothing prima facie.

it would include a man who offered a homeless woman the chance to spend the below-zero winter night inside his warm house in exchange for having sex with him once

If his house is the only shelter around, then I think this case is different because leaving someone to die in the cold wouldn't be justified in the first place. So exploitation is better than doing nothing, but doing nothing isn't justified.

However, your argument is comparison fallacy. Just because one thing is better than another, doesn't make either option good.

Okay, but if A > B, and B is justified, it stands to reason that A is justified as well. It seems to me that either not helping has to be justified in most cases, or everyone is obligated to give their excess income to the most effective charities.

I would say that capitalists who buy bunch of homes to increase home prices are pretty bad to begin with.

I think this is another special case because it's worse than doing nothing. But I also think people tend to pick out special cases and generalize profit as theft overall, when I think contracts are justified most of the time, except in special cases.

I think system based on exploitation rewards exploiters the most, and causes more exploitation in the long run

Good. If exploitation didn't help the people being exploited, they wouldn't agree to it. In fact, by the broad definition of exploitation we're using, aren't both sides exploiting each other? They're both threatening to not offer the thing that belongs to them without getting something else in exchange. Maybe you're only counting it if someone's life is in danger, but is anyone really in danger of starving in the first world because an employer won't hire them? They could still be self-employed.

exploiters will also seek to create exploiting situations, not just exploit when such chance appears on its own

So, stealing? People will still do that even if contracts are illegal. In fact, if we ban contracts, people will steal more due to shortages.

Exploitation only happens when exploiter takes greater value for him than what he gives, so long term it leads to concentration of power and wealth in few hands because exploiters always gain more than the exploited

Both sides gain value or neither side would agree. It's a positive-sum game.

No, creating conditions where people end up in situation where they are easier to exploit.

So either that involves active harm (which people have incentives to do anyway), or it means they are creating helpful opportunities.

Individually, yes. Long term, no.

How does a sum of positive numbers equal a negative number?

Way more incentive when you can profit greatly from it by exploitation later.

Most big companies are inventing new products rather than causing problems to create a need. There are exceptions but the threat of lawsuits limits those. There's planned obsolescence and denial of care, but that's mitigating the benefit of the contract, not making it a net negative typically.

degradation of human relationships, those who arent helped because they cant be exploited good, and so on.

Some people being exploited is better than no one being exploited. I don't see how you can just blame capitalists for all the pre-existing issues in society.

exploitative conditions themselves harm health and mental health

The conditions exist whether the capitalist helps or does nothing.

Both wings at the extremes exploit workers but the right wing does this even when it isn't extreme.

Left wing policies are needed to balance out the evils of capitalism. I am not sure what is even conservative about capitalism. Absolutely no feature of capitalism is conservative except the concept of inheritance where I can see a tribal familial conservative aspect to it that socialism lacks.

Socialism is bad in practise as it removes the very human type of collectivism their is; tribe, nations, community (ironic given the name of its socialism's cousin communism). Humans do best when looking out for the groups around them. I don't care if genetically close or not, I literally mean around them in some environment. It is anti-human to expect humans to care 100% equally for those barely known to them 30 miles away as much as their next door neighbour. You cannot possibly think that a system that forces this fully will leave people feeling generous, thankful and all of that for each other in a community.

Both wings are corrupt evil things. Both wings have human garbage at the top of them. That's pretty much a guarantee with politics, even site politics on websites like this. All we can do is be meek, good citizens overall. That's what Lord Yeshua's apostles Peter and Paul both ordered us to be.

There's a time for significant protest but use it very, very sparingly and make the endgame Christianity, not Communism or other nonsense like 'liberty'. These are not what ends up making a society work. Look at the shitshow America is with its obsession with liberty and capitalism. You have rapist vs rapist or pig vs pig most of these elections, it's just absolutely not worth it. Chameleons rise easiest when a society is most obsessed with freedom and money.

the evils of capitalism

Look at the shitshow America is with its obsession with liberty and capitalism

I think most of this is due to contracts failing to solve certain problems, not contracts themselves causing the problems. As Bubba said, exploitation is often better than inaction. That's not to say that we shouldn't do anything to solve problems contracts fail to address, and I think mixed economies can accomplish a lot through social welfare programs. But I think blaming contracts themselves is looking at the problem the wrong way.

America has the largest Christian population in the world. What is going wrong?

The opinions of people like Bubba are a situation where I can either attack the debater personally on multiple angles and point out both hypocrisy and why people shouldn't ever strive to adhere to his worldview or I just stay quiet.

Every single person of the opinion that exploitation is better than stagnation at all times, with no willingness to slow progress for a happier, healthier society, is nearly always themselves privileged enough to be the exploitative abuser or are stuck so low down the totem pole they are unemployed, live largely off of welfare and avoid the exploitation that way, yet maybe are thinking 'I would be willing to work in somewhat exploitative conditions to secure myself a job'.

The reality is you have to understand, surely, that in practise all free market capitalism becomes is sweatshop slavery culture. The 'freedom' of the free market is a gaslight propaganda. There is no such thing as liberty as a north pole of a society's values. Anarchy becomes tyranny each and every time it arises. I wonder why that is.

You are brainwashed from birth, Savant. Especially as an American but even many nations are brainwashed. This psy-op is recognised just as much by the far left as by people like me who are proper conservative Christians (not the fake kind who vote in a rapist pig and dont even flinch defending this in such a cult-like bipartisan manner).

What you need to genuinely do is see that the far left actually do have some wisdom. There is a reason why the far left and far right share many of the exact same conspiracy theories while of course loathing each other and having different narratives to many of the conspiracy theories about the cause and way out of being under the conspirators. You don't need to be far left nor far right to see the Elites and their chokehold on things.

However, what you can do is wake up. It's there, it's real and you are just a resource to be rinsed dry to them. Your 'rights' are an unfortunate thing in their eyes, they'd still be whipping slaves if they could and they'd include all races in that. That's what the elites think like. That's what they truly are, demonic scum without morals.

The elites with morals end up like Princess Diana of UK and her estranged son Harry who is ridiculed by both wings for leaving the Royal Family there, treated like dirt with no way to escape his elitism. Elites have a way of trapping the others among them into their corrupt filth, look what Trump has been doing with his children as they've grown, he forced each one to get his/her hands so dirty they dare not snitch because they'll each get life in prison if not assassinated by an elite-hired agent first.

You have no idea at all, Savant, what evils we are up against. However, I can assure you neither far left nor far right solutions work, both are evil and tyrannical.

Every single system except Christianity-cultured systems fail to even approach being morally good. A study of human history would tell you so.

The key is Christ and yes there really was a political system he wanted but unlike Sharia of Islam it wasn't meant to be brutishly theocratic how the Catholics did it nor the high-church Protestants. The system He, the Father and Holy Spirit want is a Christian internationalism. The EU was one of the best attempts at this but then Satan quickly influenced it to be secular, atheistic so on and so forth. The alternative is to be globalists like America (this is what you don't realise and is so hilarious to me). America's right wing are extremely globalist, Trump is the epitome of American ethos. He wants to turn every nation on Earth in to a state of the USA and have a globalist end game waving the American and somehow also the Israeli flag but rest assured that Israel is not the New Testament's Israel at all, it merely has a geographic similarity to it.

Until you realise that the US is not a nation, rather an empire of 50 nations so its 'nationalism' is actually globalism, you will not understand why America is the only country where the Republicans are also somehow the so-called Conservatives. In countries with a republican streak such as France and Ireland, you also get this strangeness. Ireland's Republicans are largely very leftist while France's are like America's. However, when I say like America's France's Republicans don't pretend to care about morality and christianity the way America's right do, France's admit they're practically libertines and just want low tax, barely any restrictions on the rich getting richer, so on and so forth.

Republicanism is all dependent on what particular values the constitution of the country it applies to, happen to state. It draws on 0 real morality and the only consistent thing any Republic has is a lack of a Monarchy (even this is actually masked often, for instance Iran has been a Republic since toppling the Shah monarchy and yet its Ayatollah was replaced by none other than his son and Khamenei was a loyal student of Khomeini, handpicked for the role so that was non-genetic favouritism akin to a monarchic shift anyway).

I mean so much of this stuff is nonsense. It's all arbitrary. North Korea and China are both considered Republics and North Korea is considered a Democratic Republic, the same categorisation that America has... It's all an utter joke.

You need to realise these 'systems' the 'wings' all of it is a construct to blind us to the reality that the far left see most clear but come up with batshit insane solution to that will never work. The real clash is elites vs the working people (or impoverished even the unemployed). The system of ethics that worked best to help these at least somewhat healthily not hate each other and instead properly work together with some love between them was Christianity. No other system ever has helped the elites and the lowest on the totem pole end up working together as well to an end, without resentment, hatred, trauma etc and even Christianity has these things.

People will keep trying to reinvent the wheel but that very wheel, the whole way it works with the 2 party system offered in most nations (and even with more than 2, 2-wing system) is designed to gaslight us to choose between crony capitalism, nutcase communism and in the middle of everything some possible Sharia now and as always 'liberal' vibed left and 'libertarian' vibed right sprinkled on top. Nowhere is the Christian party running and this is by design, even many Christians are against a Christian party whereas Islamists are biding time. The Christians are having far less children than the Muslims, they're trying far less hard to push for their actual values as they've left crony capitalist right wing hijack it or alternatively severely secular leftists do whatever 'wishy washy' new age stuff with it.

Lord Yeshua must be weeping in heaven, Father must be enraged... We can only pray... Save us, Holy Spirit, please allow a real Christian to control the countries... Amen.

I think the goal of AI will be to have all religious people kill each other.

"Allahu Akbar"

Every single person of the opinion that exploitation is better than stagnation at all times, with no willingness to slow progress for a happier, healthier society, is nearly always themselves privileged enough to be the exploitative abuser or are stuck so low down the totem pole they are unemployed, live largely off of welfare and avoid the exploitation that way

Actually the people being exploited are clearly of the opinion that it is better than nothing. If they were not, they would just reject the deal. It seems illogical to say exploitation is worse than nothing and then say "they're desperate and have to accept the deal, if they do nothing they'll be worse off."

You can't reject a deal which you starve, become an incel, loser, broken and discarded if you fully reject.

You can half-reject it. This is how the 'white trash' and 'ghetto culture' stereotypes began but you can't actually reject it because both of those are an example of low-totem-pole copium with absolute societal rot and being among the rot.

You skipped over the most crucial and beautiful parts of what I wrote to hyperfocus on nonsense that just isn't true. You have been brainwashed from birth, I am telling you from actual age 0, to associate this exploitation and abusive urges from the elites to you as conservative, Christian values. They are not.

The leaders are Satanists. Your side want even lower minimum wage (or none) and want to demolish all unions, workers rights etc. It's already happening to the farmers. Since most farmers are a guaranteed vote of the Right, the US's right has begun to fully neglect them and is utterly screwing them over in so many ways that benefit those higher up the retail and products-from-farm industries.

Never ever be a wing loyalist, let alone a party loyalist. Destroy all such things from your brain and genuinely at least sit and realise how evil your favoured side is. Stop ignoring it. I want you when you have time to properly research the crimes Trump's charged with and consider if they're true, then to research more and more about him, his past as a pro-choice funder of Hillary vs Obama and more like that.

You have no idea how rigged the system is. Trump does, he said it was rigged when Biden won and said to the Republicans openly this time to cheat (literally said this out loud)

I think the reason I am very capable of this cross-wing analysis and more is because I have a particular neurodivergence and life trauma that actually gave me a significant advantage and I naturally lack tribalism in my brain. I am talking by nature, actually within me I do not get swayed too much by 1 side rather I literally can feel both sides sway me at once and it's a very rare trait as most who are 'centrists' of a sort end up there by neutrality. I am not neutral. I see both sides of a lot of things.

This idea the 'exploited want it' is 100% akin to a rapist saying the victim wanted it because he offered the victim a choice to starve instead at some point and die a loser hating life.

I'll respond to the parts of your comment that actually address my argument...

You can't reject a deal which you starve, become an incel, loser, broken and discarded if you fully reject.

If the employer is saving the employee from starvation then they are providing a lot of value, so why shouldn't they make a lot of money? Doctors make a lot of money for saving lives.

akin to a rapist saying the victim wanted it because he offered the victim a choice to starve instead

Rape is nonconsensual, and I'm not sure what it has to do with starvation.

Your brain struggles a lot with nuance, that is why you don't see it all addressed you. You filtered out every single part that addressed you which didn't fit an easy 'tit for tat' rebuttal style and would take time to internalise, research, process and reply to.

You know they say you get wiser with age, however I think this only applies to some.

I actually have become much wiser with age, the problem is many don't. Many get stuck in ruts due to arrogance. Can you be wrong?

When did you consent into the system of your nation? Age 4? Age 20? to even say you did it at age 20 requires extreme privilege to be that rich and free (freedom to move out is granted to 0 of some nations)... You don't have a clue. You are so privileged to even be a human and not a pig on a farm. Do you realise that? You don't realise how privileged you are or how real that privilege is. You brush off the woke leftist lines of thought as lies when some of what they see is actually valid.

At the same time as being privileged, you are in other ways underprivileged. You do not realise how much easier life is for the poor in a lot of Europe. To which you will say the tax system is more exploitative.

If you are a real Christian, which I doubt more and more as you reply to me, you will understand Jesus didn't oppose tax he merely wished Caesar would care more for the vulnerable.

If the employer is saving the employee from starvation then they are providing a lot of value, so why shouldn't they make a lot of money? Doctors make a lot of money for saving lives.

There is literally 0 correlation between the 2. Providing a lot of value and paying an employee the lowest you can get away with that saves them from starving... lol

I mean, is that better than him not offering any help at all? I guess if it was better, woman would not agree at all.

Again, if all the conditions spelled out in the OP were met (re: the man didn't trick or coerce her), then she would accept only if she found the deal preferable to staying outdoors and wasn't confident in her ability to secure alternative lodging in the time that she had before succumbing to the cold.

Obviously the right response in this situation would be to offer shelter (whether the person asking was male or female) with no strings attached. But my question is whether this hypothetical man did her a greater evil than somebody who gave her no choice at all and simply slammed the door in her face, knowing that their actions might result in her freezing to death.

I would say that capitalists who buy bunch of homes to increase home prices are pretty bad to begin with.

While I'd question the ability of any single homebuyer to corner the real estate market and jack up prices, anyone who so qualified would be the cause of the misery they were exploiting, thus outside the scope of this thread.