Seeing the Nail, Not the Problem
A new study made the rounds recently claiming something genuinely surprising: the Left and the Right agree on what exploitation is. Show people an abstract vignette — a stranger selling mugs, say, under conditions of unequal power and unequal gains — and libertarians, socialists, philosophers, and ordinary people from the US and UK will all point to roughly the same ingredients as morally troubling: injustice, power, inequality of outcome, unmet needs. Rank them, and the order barely moves no matter who’s doing the ranking.
The authors, writing in Jacobin, take this as vindication. If everyone agrees on the anatomy of exploitation, they argue, then the Left’s structural critique of capitalism isn’t a partisan invention — it’s common sense, buried under decades of culture-war noise. Dismantle the noise, and the public’s own moral intuitions point toward sectoral bargaining, wealth taxes, and universal housing.
I think this gets something right and something importantly wrong, and the gap between the two is worth sitting with, because it explains why arguments about capitalism go in circles.
What the study actually found
Strip away the framing and the finding is narrower and more interesting than “everyone agrees.” Participants were shown vignettes that stipulated the presence of certain properties — told, in effect, “here is a case where one party had unjust structural power and the transaction benefited them more.” Given that setup, everyone agreed the setup was bad. Power plus inequality scored worse than either alone, more than additively — what the authors call an “interaction premium.” That’s a real result. Effective bullying, dressed up as a transaction, reads as exploitative to nearly everyone, regardless of politics.
But notice what wasn’t tested: whether people agree that any particular real-world arrangement contains those ingredients. The study handed participants the diagnosis and asked whether the diagnosis, once given, was troubling. It didn’t ask them to make the diagnosis themselves. And on the one place where the data lets us see real-world disagreement creep back in, it’s substantial — libertarians scored the very same vignettes 10 to 15 points lower than egalitarians did. Same concept. Same rank-ordering of what matters. Wildly different threshold for calling something exploitation once you have to actually apply the concept to a case.
The nail, not the hammer
There’s an old line about how, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s usually deployed as a warning about method — don’t let your tool dictate your diagnosis. But I think the more interesting version of the problem runs the other way. It’s not that the Left and Right have different hammers. The study suggests they’re holding the same hammer. The disagreement is about which things in the world are nails.
One way of understanding the disagreement — an explanatory model, not a finding either this study or I have actually demonstrated — is that the Left’s default posture toward an unequal outcome is to ask what unjust power produced this?, treating power as present until proven otherwise, because history offers plenty of evidence that unequal outcomes can be produced and sustained by entrenched power. The Right’s default posture, on this account, is closer to what voluntary choices produced this?, treating power as absent until proven otherwise, on the assumption that markets erode illegitimate advantage over time through competition and exit. Both sides, shown a case where power and injustice are stipulated as given, condemn it. The argument was never really about the stipulation. It’s about the priors people bring to unstipulated life.
This matters because it means the study’s headline claim — the Left and Right share a moral theory of exploitation — is true in a sense that changes less than it seems to. Two people can agree perfectly on the definition of “unjustly gained” and disagree completely, and sincerely, about whether Amazon’s relationship to its warehouse workers is an instance of it.
That said, it would be too tidy to say the concept itself is never in dispute. Some disagreement really is conceptual, not just factual: a libertarian and a Marxist can agree on every fact about an employment relationship and still disagree about whether the dependence created by property rights counts as coercive power in the first place, or whether exploitation is fundamentally about unfair distribution, domination, appropriated surplus, or a failed reciprocity — theorists don’t converge on that either. So the shared concept doesn’t settle the contested territory; it just relocates it. Much of the real fight happens when people have to identify, in a specific case, whether the stipulated conditions actually hold.
Three arguments the study doesn’t settle
It’s tempting, especially from the Left, to read the Right’s lower scores as evidence of moral indifference — as if conservatives looked at the exact same power imbalance and just shrugged, or worse, blessed it. God’s design. Just work harder. That framing isn’t wrong exactly — there is a real strand of providentialist thinking on the Right that treats market outcomes as more or less earned by definition. But reducing the market-friendly case to that strand, whatever share of the Right it actually represents, lets the Left skip past three much stronger objections that the study doesn’t touch at all — and notice these aren’t three versions of “not a problem.” They’re three different kinds of disagreement, only one of which denies a problem exists at all.
The entitlement objection says: that isn’t an injustice. Nozick’s argument was never “inequality is good, actually.” It was that calling an outcome exploitative smuggles in a claim about what people were owed in the first place — and that claim needs its own defense, separate from the fact that the outcome is unequal. If the mug-seller acquired the only stock of mugs through fair means, the fact that he now has leverage over the buyer isn’t obviously an injustice; it might just be the shape scarcity takes. A close cousin of this is a disagreement about the counterfactual: two people can agree a worker has little bargaining power, that the employer captures most of the surplus, and that the arrangement is unequal — and still disagree about whether that’s exploitation, because one is asking “unequal compared to what?” If the available alternative is no job at all, an unequal transaction can look mutually beneficial rather than exploitative, not because the power asymmetry is denied, but because the moral verdict depends on the baseline you’re measuring against. Deny either of these and you need an argument, not just a vignette showing that unequal-plus-powerful ranks badly on a slider.
The empirical objection says: that may be a problem, but it’s temporary. One major strand of market-friendly thought doesn’t dispute that power asymmetries are exploitative when real — it disputes that they’re as durable or as common as the Left assumes. A single employer in town looks like unjust power right up until a competitor opens across the street, or workers organize, or automation changes the calculus. On this view, most apparent “exploitation” is a snapshot of a self-correcting process, and treating it as a permanent structural feature overstates how sticky power actually is. This is a testable disagreement about the world, not a moral disagreement about mugs.
The institutional objection says: that’s a real problem, but your fix may be worse. Some on the Right would grant every finding in the study and still resist the policy conclusion, on the grounds that “the public condemns X when described abstractly” is a thin foundation for “the public wants sectoral bargaining and wealth taxes.” People can hate the pattern of exploitation and still disagree fiercely about which interventions reduce it versus which ones just relocate the power imbalance to a different actor — the state, a union bureaucracy, a regulator captured by incumbents. Agreeing that power is bad when abused is not the same as agreeing on who should be trusted to hold it instead.
None of these three objections require believing capitalism is providentially ordained or that the losers just didn’t work hard enough. They’re arguments about entitlement and counterfactuals, about durability, and about institutional trust — and they survive the study completely intact, because the study never tested any of them. Notice, too, that the third one doesn’t even require denying that exploitation occurred — it concedes the diagnosis and disputes the cure. Lumping all three under “the Right doesn’t think it’s a problem” erases exactly the distinction that makes them worth taking seriously.
Why this keeps happening
The deeper pattern here isn’t specific to exploitation. It shows up anywhere researchers find that people converge on the structure of a moral concept and then treat that convergence as settling a live political dispute. Structure is cheap to agree on. Everyone agrees murder is wrong; the fights are about self-defense, war, and the death penalty. Everyone agrees theft is wrong; the fights are about taxation and eminent domain. Everyone, it turns out, agrees exploitation is the unjust use of power for unequal gain; the fight was always going to be about which cases count.
Push on that pattern and it points to something bigger than this one study. Political polarization frequently doesn’t come from people holding entirely different moral vocabularies. It comes from people classifying the same reality differently — and that classification depends on prior beliefs about causation, entitlement, historical injustice, institutional competence, incentives, and counterfactuals. Abstract normative convergence is not applied normative convergence. Agreeing on the shape of a wrong is not the same as agreeing on where it exists.
So when the article concludes that “the public already condemns” the power asymmetries the Left wants to dismantle, that’s doing a lot of unlicensed work. The public condemns power asymmetries when told they’re unjust. Whether they believe your specific target — a landlord, an employer, a platform company — actually holds unjust power is a separate question the mug study was carefully designed not to ask, because asking it would have reintroduced exactly the polarization the researchers were trying to strip out.
That’s not a flaw in the study, to be clear — it’s good methodology for the narrow question it set out to answer. The flaw is in the leap from “we found the shared skeleton of a moral concept” to “therefore the Left’s policy agenda is what common sense already wants.” You can hold the same hammer as someone and still build something entirely different, because the argument was never really about the hammer. It was about where you’re both willing to point it.
If there’s a companion piece here, it’s the mirror-image essay: what the Right’s empirical objections get wrong when they assume market power erodes faster than it actually does. That’s for another week.