Paying for a Service

Summary #

This post discusses the ethics of paying for services from a Kantian perspective. It argues that paying for a service is morally permissible only if the service provider has realistic alternative means of subsistence, meaning they can genuinely consent. Prostitution and other sex work is especially problematic due to the reciprocal nature of sex, the intimate involvement of the body and the social stigma attached to prostitution/sex work. This analysis can be extended to transactions involving corporations, as corporations can be seen as moral agents for practical purposes, although they act through human constituents.

Paying for a Service #

So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.

– Immanuel Kant (2012)

In order to know what is meant by “treating humanity as an end”, we need only consider this argument, and see how humanity got to be an end in itself. What was in question was the source of the goodness of an end – the goodness say, of some ordinary object of inclination. This source was traced to the power of rationally choosing ends, exercised in this case on this end. So when Kant says rational nature or humanity is an end in itself, it is the power of rational choice that he is referring to, and in particular, the power to set an end (to make something an end by conferring the status of goodness on it) and pursue it by rational means.

– Christine M. Korsgaard (2018)

Is it wrong to hire a housekeeper to clean your house? How about paying an Uber driver to get you home after dinner? Or engaging a master chef to cook at your wedding? In other words, is it wrong to pay somebody to provide you a service? I think that, under certain conditions, it is wrong to do so. Specifically, I think it’s wrong when the person you are paying does not see any alternative way of subsisting.

Paraphrasing Kajsa Ekis Ekman, if a person wants to clean your house, they clean your house; the only reason for there to be money involved is that they don’t really want to do it. That’s true in a way but it’s too strict to keep as a moral rule. It implies that there can be no bargaining, that any exchange of money for goods or labour is coercion. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think a person can consent to such an exchange iff they see alternative ways of subsisting, such that they don’t feel forced to accept the kind of offer you are making. If they don’t see these alternative ways, they can’t turn down the offer without risking destitution. It is the payment that renders them unable to refuse it; if you had offered them the chance to clean your house without payment, they could very easily have refused.

By subsisting I mean having what people generally hold to be the necessities of life, of minimally supporting oneself. This of course varies from place to place and time to time. I think there are a lot of people working jobs they really can’t afford to quit today. For example, a survey done by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights reports that migrants are often forced to work long hours with no or little pay, sometimes without access to bathrooms or running water, often living in fear of their employers or under threat of losing their wages or being reported to the authorities. In the U.K., 7.7% of adults report having slept in a homeless shelter or on the streets at least once in their lives; in Italy, 4.0%; in Germany, 2.4% (Toro et al. 2007). These people don’t have much choice in how to support themselves, maybe none at all. Paying somebody in that position to do something for you seems to me to violate Kant’s Formula of Humanity: it involves forcing them to further your own end and at the same time preventing them from pursuing theirs: it means treating them as a mere means.

(I’m talking about people’s subjective view of their situation. If one makes an offer to a person who deludedly thinks they have no choice but to accept even if objectively and materially they do have a choice, then one is coercing that person. If one makes an offer to someone who realistically has no other pathway to sustenance but believes that they do, then, assuming one has perfect knowledge, one is not coercing that person. Of course we don’t have perfect knowledge as to whether the other person sees alternative ways of subsisting. So we have to make inferences. Some things that we can consider include how enjoyable the nature of the work is, how much it normally pays and how society looks upon it, in other words, how desirable it is.^[1])

One consequence of all this is that, the more one pays, the more coercive is the offer one makes; and likewise, the less the person one pays needs in order to subsist, the more coercive is the offer. That might seem counterintuitive. But on reflection it makes sense. Because it’s easy to turn down a miserly offer, but it’s much harder to turn down a generous offer.

So suppose one is considering paying a person to clean one’s house. Suppose the person is very poor and has no other means of providing for themself. In Kantianism, I think, this act would be bad, because one would be treating that person as a mere means. But its badness (or goodness) also seems like it should depend on how bad (or good) being compelled to clean someone’s house is generally for a person who is compelled to do it. That’s because, when acting morally, one should act as if one is inventing a universal maxim, the sort of maxim with which no reasonable person would disagree. Acts according to such a maxim will give no one a legitimate complaint against the one who acts. And the worse the thing you’re being compelled to do is for them, the more reasonable it is for them to disagree with a maxim that allows it.

There’s an important objection to the argument I’m outlined here. If it’s wrong to pay somebody to provide you a service, then acting according to this rule involves denying the seller some money that they probably desperately needed. How are all these service workers going to survive the great moral awakening advocated here, when no person will hire them anymore?

I think that, in addition to the negative duty not to coerce somebody into pursuing our ends, there is also a positive duty to help them pursue their ends where possible. This means, if one is in a situation where one can pay a destitute person a sum of money to clean one’s house, then one is probably also in a position to donate that sum to them. So the choice isn’t so much between, on the one hand, paying somebody for a service and, on the other, not doing it, but between giving a person in need a sum of money conditionally and doing it unconditionally.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics describes a phenomenon where people are accorded blame for having just observed or interacted with a problem, even if they didn’t make that problem worse. The post gives a number of real-life examples of this phenomenon. It then argues that this kind of blaming is irrational – that a person who observes and interacts with a problem should not be blamed for it but, on the contrary, if they make things even just the tiniest bit better by providing those who suffer from the problem with purely additional options, should be praised for it.

I don’t disagree with the general point made there, but I think the agents in a couple of the examples brought up are blameworthy:

• During the South by Southwest festival of 2012, a creative agency paid 13 homeless people 20 dollars a day to carry Wi-Fi hotspots around Austin, offering them to tweet-horny festival attendees. This proved controversial.
• In 2014, the city of Detroit began to crack down on unpaid water bills; suddenly, many poor residents were at risk of having their water shut off. PETA offered to pay the water bills for up to ten families under the condition that these families go vegan for 30 days. This, too, proved controversial.

From a consequentialist perspective, it seems plausible that everyone in these situations were left better off. But intuitively, it looks like coercion or exploitation. I think the intuition has merit in these cases. The creative agency and PETA are clearly treating these people as mere means to further their own ends, and not as ends in themselves. They could (and should) have just donated the money unconditionally to the homeless people of Austin and to the poor families in Detroit.^[2] But instead they took the opportunity of making these people do things they probably wouldn’t have done had they been reasonably well off. That seems wrong.

Paying for Sex #

So the so far argument is: paying a person to provide a service is wrong iff that person sees no alternative way of subsisting, and the badness/goodness of the act depends the badness/goodness of the nature of the work generally for someone who’s compelled to do it. This section discusses one situation where the wrong is especially egregious, namely prostitution/sex work^[3].

Of course there are many different varieties of prostitution and sex work, from upscale escorts who can choose their own prices, services, clients and work hours on one end to trafficked street prostitutes who are at the mercy of a pimp on the other. There are prostitutes who choose that occupation in spite of the many alternatives available to them and who therefore are able to meaningfully consent. That said, there aren’t a lot of things that abolitionists and sex worker advocates agree on, but they do seem to agree that many prostitutes and other sex workers today are trapped in pretty bad situations. For example, prostitution and sex work is associated with increased risk of violence and murder, increased risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, worse mental health, police violence and harassment and so on (Platt et al. 2018). Often those who become prostitutes have grown up in difficult circumstances: there’s the poverty, of course, but also evidence that many have experienced childhood sexual abuse (Abramovich 2005). In Germany, where I live, the majority are migrants coming from poorer countries, mainly from Eastern Europe.^[4]

It follows from the previous argument that paying for sex is wrong in the same way that paying somebody to clean your house is wrong. But I think that paying for sex is substantially worse than paying somebody to clean your house, for three reasons.

Reason No. 1 #

The first reason is something that I can’t quite put my finger on, but has to do with the fact that sex is supposed to be a reciprocal act. If two people want to have sex, they have sex. You don’t hear of people offering to clean somebody else’s house for free, nor for that matter of people reciprocally cleaning each other’s houses.^[5]

I think one consequence of this is that many people, should somebody clean their house for free, would still insist on paying. They feel that they owe something to the person who helped them. But those same people, when somebody has sex with them, don’t insist on paying. That’s because they see the latter as a reciprocal act, one meant to be intrinsically good for both parties, whereas the former is seen as a service, something typically done in return for money or other resources.

In my view, this shows that the person who pays for sex is interested purely in what is good for him, namely sexual satisfaction. Because if he could have gotten her to have sex with him without paying her for it, voluntarily, he would have done that instead.^[6] That suggests he is ignoring the ends that she has chosen for herself, the ends that she has decided to pursue.

Reason No. 2 #

The second reason is grounded in the common-sense observation that our bodies are highly ethically important. Without our bodies, we are nothing. The well-functioning of our bodies is our own well-functioning; what is good for our bodies is also good for us. That is why we feel pain and discomfort and seek to avoid it. That is why we eat, drink, sleep and exercise. It’s also reflected in the moral intuitions many have around things like organ markets and paying others to permanently tattoo advertisements on their skin.

Sex seems to have a unique significance that goes beyond mere social convention. Attitudes to sex certainly vary across cultures, but nowhere that I’m aware of do humans look upon it without conferring on it some kind of special importance. With very few exceptions, people everywhere have always sought privacy for sex. If that’s just a convention, it seems like a very powerful one. But even if it’s just a convention, it is still that and, as a result, merits special consideration.

Prostitution inherently involves granting/getting intimate access to a body. Typically the person being granted this access is a stranger, sometimes probably an unpleasant or dangerous person. The physical intimacy, and the necessary involvement of the body, seems like it opens up the door for worse harms.

Reason No. 3 #

The third reason to think paying for sex is an especially serious moral wrong is that sex work carries a powerful stigma. The work itself is sometimes humiliating. When it isn’t, there is in most societies a mark of dishonour imprinted on those involved in it. If this stigma were greatly reduced or eliminated (and I hope it will be), the harm also would be reduced or eliminated. But until then, we need to factor the stigma into our moral calculus.

Sex worker advocates seek to remedy the situation through decriminalisation, which they argue will weaken the stigma and improve sex workers’ conditions by making sex work more similar to other kinds of work. Abolitionists seek to remedy the situation by outlawing the purchase of sex and at the same time supporting sex workers economically and socially, eventually, is the hope, abolishing prostitution entirely.

As I’ve noted before, I’m not a consequentialist. I wouldn’t expect either of the two solutions to fully remedy the problem anyway. But, for reasons I’ve hopefully made clear here, I’m sympathetic towards the abolitionists’ position, because I think paying for sex is very often wrong and “don’t pay for sex” is a good norm to enforce. I also think it’s possible, and in my opinion desirable, to have a situation where the act is stigmatised while being subjected to the act is not, as is already mostly the case with robbery and being robbed, assaulting and being assaulted, lying and being lied to. These acts are all illegal to do but not illegal to be subjected to; for all of them, it is chiefly the doing to which the stigma is attached.^[7]

Whither All This? #

Those are some reasons to think that the work in sex work and especially prostitution is worse than most other work, at least when coerced. It’s probably because of these reasons that prostitution for many (though not all) becomes a kind of last resort. Because it’s stigmatised, because it involves sex, because it turns what is supposed to be a reciprocal act into a mere service, many wouldn’t even think to undertake it unless their situations were very dire indeed. That means we should be extra sceptical, absent more detailed information, that a given prostitute has meaningful alternatives to prostitution.

(I mentioned that I lean towards the abolitionists’ position. But an even better solution to the problem is to end the sorts of poverty and destitution that limit people’s choices in the first place. Under a universal basic income, for example, perhaps nearly everyone would have alternatives to prostitution and it would be much harder to coerce somebody with money. We’re a long way from that now. But in other ways we are not.)

Paying a Corporation #

Corporations are people, my friend.

– Mitt Romney

When the creative agency paid homeless people to carry Wi-Fi hotspots around Austin during South by Southwest, it probably wronged those homeless people. It wronged them by treating them as mere means to further their own ends (generating promotional buzz). But the creative agency is a company, not a person. Does it make sense to say that a company has “wronged” someone? What should we think about those festival attendees who took advantage of the free hotspots?

Another way to approach this problem is by introducing the corporation as an intermediary in a moral interaction. Take, for example, two comfortably paid programmers, Dante and Serena. Dante is employed by a software consultancy, but Serena is a freelancer. If you offer to pay Serena for her services, she is free to take your offer or not: there is no coercion. But if you negotiate a deal with the software consultancy for Dante’s services, he has no say in the matter, because he is contractually obliged to do whatever work the consultancy asks him to do. On the surface, it looks as if you are coercing Dante, but of course no right-thinking person would say that you were. That’s because he has previously chosen to sign away part of his freedom to the consultancy, in return for benefits like a salary. This admittedly looks like a silly example. But now consider a situation where Dante had unwillingly signed away his freedom. In that situation, it does seem wrong to make a deal for his services, though, as we shall see, under some circumstances it is not so clear-cut.

I’ll return to the problem of paying corporations for services. But first, I’ll discuss how I see corporations fitting into our moral landscape in the first place.

Are Corporations People? #

But that’s not a very good way of posing this question, because being a person involves lots of things that have nothing to do with morality. It’s normal that corporations, like people, can own property, have legal rights and so on. In that sense they are people. But do they have moral agency? In other words, are they the kind of thing that acts according to some idea of right and wrong, and that can therefore be held responsible for its decisions? (Whether they have moral standing – whether we should take them into account in our moral decisions – is a different question, which we can ignore here.) To think about this, we must think about what it is that confers moral agency on humans while failing to do so on the other animals.

Remember that a corporation is a type of organisation. An organisation is made up of people who have come together in order to work towards some purpose. The purpose of corporations is to produce goods or services, usually in order to profit.

Philosophers have debated the moral status of corporations for at least 40 years and I don’t know all the intricacies of that debate. So let us consult the Library of Alexandria:

[Peter A. French] bases this conclusion [that corporations are moral persons] on his claim that firms have internal decision-making structures, through which they (1) cause events to happen, and (2) act intentionally. Some early responses to French’s work accepted the claim that firms are moral agents, but denied that firms are moral persons. […] Other responses denied that firms are moral agents (also). [Manuel Velasquez] argues that firms lack a necessary condition of agency, viz., the ability to act[.]

From what I can tell, most philosophers agree that corporations are moral agents. Of course, that still leaves open questions about how the different employees, as individual moral agents, are related to the corporation as an encompassing moral agent. When a corporation acts wrongly, to which extent, if any, have its employees also acted wrongly? This seems like a pretty complicated question which I’ll ignore here, because what I am interested in is the relationship between corporations and those who buy their services.

I think what makes us humans moral agents is the fact that we are aware of the reasons for our actions and have the ability to act on that awareness. We hold each other responsible for our actions because we could have acted differently. The other animals act, too, but instinctively – they aren’t aware of why they do the things they do in the way that humans are. The same is true for very young children and some severely mentally disabled people, which is why we don’t hold them responsible for their actions, either.

Now, I can’t think of a corporate act that is not initiated by one or more of its employees. So I don’t think corporations can act in the sense that humans can act – as the initial cause of a series of events. Instead, they are superstructures constituted by humans; maybe they’re not true moral agents, but we can at least usefully see them, talk about them and hold them accountable as moral agents; just as we can talk both of the survival of a species and the survival of each member, so we can also talk about the duties of a corporation and the duties of each employee.

Chef in Shackles #

Here is a thought experiment adapted from one used in discussions about vegetarianism specifically, but which applies to participation in wrong-doing generally. I’ll state it in an easy form initially and then modify it so as to make it gradually harder, at each step evaluating it according to Kantian principles. In its first form, it goes:

(E1) Food SPE runs Chef without Shackles, a restaurant where the chef is known to be working of his or her free will. The chef is superb; the food is delicious.

This is the exact same case as the one with the programmer employed by a software consultancy. No one will object to anyone’s eating in this restaurant; most of us eat at restaurants like this regularly. So let’s make the case more interesting (modifications in italics):

(E2) Food SPE runs Chef in Shackles, a restaurant where the chef is known to be held against his or her will. The enslaved chef is superb; the food is delicious.

First things first: obviously Food SPE is committing a moral error by holding the chef captive: the company has violated Kant’s Formula of Humanity by using the chef as a mere means to further whatever ends it has in mind (so to put it). But are you, should you go eat at this restaurant, acting wrongly? I think it’s pretty clear that, just like Food SPE, you are also using the enslaved chef as a mere means to achieve your end (having a nice meal). If you do not show up that day, perhaps the chef would not have to prepare that meal. What’s more, in producing demand for this sort of service, you are the initiator of a causal chain of events that may lead to the chef staying (or further similar chefs becoming) enslaved. The restaurant is a link between you and the chef but that distance doesn’t change the moral calculation: it’s still just as if you had been forcing the chef to cook for you directly.

But we can complicate the scenario:

(E3) Food SPE runs Chef in Shackles, a restaurant where the chef is known to be held against his or her will. The company will run the restaurant regardless of how many people come. The chef will be made to prepare the same number of meals regardless of how many people come. In fact, the company just burns the money that comes in. The enslaved chef is superb; the food is delicious.

E3 takes care of both the producing demand objection as well as the objection that your action creates new and especial work for the enslaved chef. It also doesn’t seem like you are in any way benefitting Food SPE by patronising their restaurant (though if it does seem like that, let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that you aren’t). Are you now, should you go eat at Chef in Shackles, acting wrongly? It doesn’t seem like it. You don’t seem to be using the chef as a mere means because your action could not interfere with the chef’s ability to choose his or her own ends and pursue them. From a utilitarian perspective, you’re not really doing anything wrong, because the only effect your action has is (presumably) that of making yourself a little bit happier, having eaten that delicious meal. But most people, should they happen to pass Chef in Shackles during dinner time, would choose not to eat there. Most people would probably feel ashamed or guilt-stricken if they did so. Is that feeling groundless?

The act seems to pass the test of the Formula of Humanity. Does it pass the test of the Formula of Universal Law? Before we can determine that, we need to determine which maxim you’re acting on. It should be something like this^[8]:

(M1) Use the services of a slave-owning restaurant for the purpose of enjoying a nice meal when doing so neither harms the enslaved chef nor benefits the restaurant.

Kant’s Formula of Universal Law tells us to imagine that the maxim one is acting on is the standard action in that situation, and then to determine whether the maxim’s purpose would be thwarted if that were the case.^[9] Put differently, the test tells us whether action X could be the universal method of achieving purpose Y.

So does M1 pass the test of the Formula of Universal Law? If going to eat at restaurants with enslaved chefs were the universal method of enjoying a nice meal, there would be a great deal of these restaurants, and there’s a good chance that one of them might need or want to enslave you, the person who is willing this maxim. But if you are enslaved in this way, you are not able to decide to have a nice meal, because you are at the mercy of your owner. So your purpose has a small but notable chance of being thwarted. More generally, in order to pursue the end of having a nice meal, you need freedom to pursue it rationally. But a world in which you run a considerable risk of being enslaved is a world in which such freedom is far from guaranteed. Your efficacy in getting your meal depends, in part at least, on other people not using your same method to achieve your same purpose.^[10]

So maybe M1 doesn’t pass the test of the Formula of Universal Law: it can’t be a universal method of achieving its purpose. Therefore, it’s probably wrong to act according to M1. However, we can sidestep the issue by making another adjustment. We can act instead according to the maxim:

(M2) Use the services of whatever restaurant is near at hand for the purpose of enjoying a nice meal when doing so neither harms the chef nor benefits the restaurant.

M2 passes both tests, because there’s nothing in the intention that specifies that the restaurant needs to be a slave-owning one. Therefore, it seems permissible to act according to M2, even if the restaurant you happen to visit is Chef in Shackles.

What to take away from this? The first thing should be that, in Kantian moral philosophy, intentions matter. And, intuitively, it does seem more heinous to act according to M1 than to act according to M2 – it seems more heinous in the first instance because one is intentionally seeking out a slave-owning restaurant. In this way, the tests produce pretty intuitive outcomes.

But it’s also the case that this thought experiment and this ethical framework are fragile. Poke at any side and it changes its colour. Because it’s easy to imagine many different variations of it that all introduce different harms to the chef, each of which variation would shift the thought experiment in the same direction: towards making M2 coercive, too. I had to carefully construct the situation where it could be permissible to interact with Chef in Shackles. In practice, all that means is, in the real world, with imperfect information, we ought in similar situations to judge cautiously, because if we happen to be wrong about a single detail (maybe the restaurant doesn’t burn the money after all) then the moral goodness or badness of the maxim changes.

References #

Footnotes #

1. We could also ask them, but I’m not sure we can always expect a truthful response. Because they will be incentivised to say whatever will make them more likely to get money, especially if they are destitute. And who can blame them for lying! Well, I guess Kant could. ↩︎

2. There is a tangential issue here of whether the creative agency or PETA are more blameworthy than any person who could in theory make these donations. Usually we hold people responsible for their actions to the degree that they were able to act differently. That’s why we don’t blame lions for killing gazelles nor children for their failings and also why we treat mentally ill criminals differently from sane criminals. The fact that the creative agency and PETA did pay or offer to pay these people suggests that they were aware of them and their problems and could have donated this money to them. So that, I think, is some reason to blame them more than the median American, though it seems like a pretty weak reason. ↩︎

3. I’m using the word prostitution here to refer to paying and being paid for sex specifically and the word sex work to refer to any sex-related work, including that of strippers, cam girls, glamour models and so on. I know that different people use these terms differently. I also know that abolitionists and sex worker advocates prefer different words; I don’t want to take a side in that discussion. I’ll also sometimes use the masculine pronoun to refer to a person who pays for sex and the feminine for a prostitute (or “sex worker” or “prostituted woman”, depending on your worldview). That’s not because all johns are men and every prostitute a woman. But I think it’s fair because the vast majority of johns are men and a large majority of prostitutes are women. ↩︎

4. See here and here. ↩︎

5. Actually I have heard of people doing this for free: I think it’s a kink. Good for them! But these people are rare enough that we can bracket them for the purposes of this argument. ↩︎

6. Again, modulo some kinks. ↩︎

7. Of course there are situations where this is not true or where the reverse is even true. For instance, in some cultures victims of such acts may be blamed and shamed even more than perpetrators. Or in some gangster cultures wrongful acts may be glorified and being subjected to them stigmatised (because of perceived weakness, say). But that only shows that these perceptions are highly malleable, such that it should be very possible for a society to stigmatise paying for sex but not being paid for it. ↩︎

8. There’s a kind of edge case here where the person intends to benefit from the enslaved chef but in the end doesn’t. For example, maybe they get food poisoning. So it’s important to read the purpose as an intention, regardless of the action’s actually likely or possible outcomes. ↩︎

9. See Korsgaard (1996). But note that there are different interpretations of how contradictions of this sort arise when universalising. Here I use the test of practical consideration, which is also the one endorsed by Korsgaard. See Korsgaard (1985) for more on this. ↩︎

10. Specifically, I think this is, in Kantian parlance, a contradiction in the will, which would make this an imperfect (meritorious) duty. ↩︎