This Forbes piece on whether colleges should pay their athletes contains a familiar bit of bullshit logic that reveals a lot about capitalist labor ethics.
It’s called the free marketplace. Why don’t schools pay? Because they don’t have to.
Slavery was also a consequence of the free marketplace, where plantation owners were free to own other human beings which were legitimately bought and sold in literal marketplaces as factors of production. Plantation owners did not pay, because they didn't have to. Their ability to withhold pay, like that of colleges with respect to their athletes, was contingent on a set of legal and social conditions that enabled the practice. The fact that such conditions exist do not legitimize them per se. Once it was decided that people shouldn't be able to own other humans, this arrangement was no longer possible. The fact that this arrangement of requiring athletes to perform without pay as a condition of their education exists because "they don't have to" pay, only tell us that is legal and practically feasible. Its legality and feasibility say nothing of its ethical legitimacy.
And let’s not call them exploited – they aren’t. Slaves were exploited. A scholarship athlete at a university can leave anytime he wants to, free to become a tuition-paying student like anyone else.
OK, putting aside whether a sports scholarship is really a good deal: Suppose it were easy for slaves to leave. (For instance, say Plessy v. Ferguson were decided differently such that there were no real fear of retribution, and a plantation was within reasonable distance of a state where slavery was banned, which is a pretty plausible alternate history.) Is slavery then justified? The difficulty of exit in contracts is never objectively so black and white (i.e., all arrangements fall into either freely entered and exited, or one of purely coercion from which it is impossible to escape). Rather, voluntariness, and the difficulty of exit in contracts, exists on a spectrum of coerciveness that is contingent on social conditions and a calculation of risk, such as the state's ability to enforce the property right of the slaveowner and the slave's physical ability to escape and risk being caught by their owner. You can make voluntariness a condition of whether contracts are valid or legitimate (legally or ethically), but that would be independent from the question of whether they are exploitative.
See also: sharecroppers. We might say that arrangements that are exploitative, such as that of the sharecropper, are legally legitimate (just as the slavery arrangement was legally legitimate before the 13th Amendment), while also being ethically invalid. You know, because it's exploitative. Here's the definition of "exploit," since Tom Van Riper appears to have been too lazy to look it up:
verb |ikˈsploit| [ trans. ]
use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way : the company was exploiting a legal loophole | accusations that he exploited a wealthy patient.
benefit unfairly from the work of (someone), typically by overworking or underpaying them : making money does not always mean exploiting others.
Note: nothing about voluntariness.
