A Welfarist Solution to the Exploitation Problem

That some mutually beneficial exchanges could be impermissibly exploitative is generally thought to be incompatible with welfarism – a perspective emphasising the moral value of satisfied preferences. The present article argues that both perspectives can be reconciled by turning Kaldor-Hicks inefficiency into a necessary condition for exploitation. The ensuing account provides a parsimonious answer to the so-called exploitation problem, at the cost of accurate intuition tracking.