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Abstract
While exploitation is a widely used notion in moral and political philosophy, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a fully adequate account of the concept has yet to be provided. The theories proposed so far generally fail to account for a large scope of exploitative interactions and relationships, especially those contained within more personal and intimate contexts.
The objective of this dissertation is to analyze some of the most prevalent theories of the general notion of exploitation (especially the consent-based and vulnerability-based accounts), and to show why they fail to account for full range of exploitation among intimates. My central argument is that exploitation often consists in use of another person that is made wrongful neither by the exploitee's characteristics and circumstances, nor by the exploiter's mere acts, but rather by the nature of the exploiter's mental states, such as her motives, dispositions, attitudes, feelings, intentions, and so on. In the end, I propose that, especially within genuinely intimate relationships, the exploiter's failure to properly care about the exploitee can be particularly relevant to an adequate explanation of what makes the exploiter's actions in fact exploitative.
