Benefiting from Injustice and the Common-Source Problem

Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2017) 20:1067–1081 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9845-7 Benefiting from Injustice and the Common-Source Problem Göran Duus-Otterström 1,2,3 Accepted: 27 October 2017 / Published online: 7 November 2017 # The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract According to the Beneficiary Pays Principle, innocent beneficiaries of an injustice stand in a special moral relationship with the victims of the same injustice. Critics have argued that it is normatively irrelevant that a beneficiary and a victim are connected in virtue of the same unjust 'source'. The aim of this paper is to defend the Beneficiary Pays Principle against this criticism. Locating the principle against the backdrop of corrective justice, it argues that the principle is correct in saying that innocent beneficiaries of an injustice may have an extra reason to assist the victims of that injustice. This is because it may be necessary to defeat the immoral plan of the perpetrator of the injustice and because it may satisfy weak restitution. The conclusion is that the principle is distinctive from related views, such as that property should be returned to its rightful owner or that tainted benefits should be given up for general use. Keywords Beneficiary pays principle . Compensation . Corrective justice . Injustice . Restitution 1 Introduction Many philosophers and political theorists today accept The Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP): ‘the involuntary receipt of benefits stemming from injustice can, in some circumstances, give rise to rectificatory obligations to the victims of the injustice in question’ (Butt 2014, p. 336). * Göran Duus-Otterström 1 Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 711, 40530 Gothenburg, Sweden 2 Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark 3 Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden 1068 G. Duus-Otterström This principle has been invoked in a wide range of debates.1 It is often originally attributed to J.J. Thomson (1973), who drew on it in her defense of preferential hiring. Today it is perhaps most widely discussed in the literature on how the burdens of mitigating and adapting to climate change should be allocated, where BPP is sometimes considered a valuable complement to the Polluter Pays Principle.2 The merit of the principle, according to its defenders, is that it allows us to assign remedial obligations even when the perpetrators of an injustice cannot or will not accept liability, but without relying on brute ability to pay. BPP needs to be fleshed out in several ways. One question concerns the proper definition of benefits. This has partly to do with settling the metric of benefits, that is, whether ‘benefits’ refer to welfare, resources, or something else. But it also involves working out the generic meaning of what it means to benefit from something. Victor Tadros (2014) refers to this as the measure of benefits. The traditional (counterfactual) understanding is that an actor A ‘benefits’ from X if and only if X renders A better off than A would otherwise have been. But it could also be argued that A ‘benefits’ from X simply if X produced some good that ended up in A’s possession. On this actual-sequence approach to benefiting, it is not necessary that X render A better off than otherwise (Lippert-Rasmussen 2017, p. 85).3 Another question concerns how to understand the ‘injustice’ from which actors benefit. This is not always straightforward. Consider, for example, the case of climate change: should we target (1) the benefits flowing from excessive greenhouse gas emissions, (2) the benefits flowing from the international failure to prevent climate change, or (3) the benefits flowing from the changing climate? The choice makes a big difference for which actors BPP will single out. The benefits that were produced by past emissions, for example, are probably not the same as the benefits produced by the international policy failure. But suppose we have completed these steps, and suppose further that we agree that benefits stemming from injustice at least sometimes should be disgorged, even when people have done nothing wrong to possess them.4 This would not amount to our accepting BPP, because it does not commit us to the ‘directed’ nature of this principle. Note that Daniel Butt’s formulation talks specifically about rectificatory obligations to ‘the victims of the injustice in question’. This feature is common to almost all formulations of BPP. The idea is that there is normative significance to the fact that someone gains and someone else loses as the result of the same injustice, such that the person who gains has rectificatory obligations to the person who loses in particular. In the climate justice debate, for example, it is often claimed that a large share of the costs of responding to climate change should be covered specifically by wealth stemming from the economic activities that caused climate change (Shue 1999; Page 2012; DuusOtterström 2014). This directedness is what makes BPP different from a view like undirected disgorgement, according to which tainted benefits should be given up but go back into society’s general pool of resources (Goodin 2013). Let us say that BPP posits that there is normative significance to the fact that there is a ‘common source’—typically a wrongfully 1 See, e.g., Anwander (2005); Butt (2007, 2009, 2014); Pogge (2008); Barry and Kirby (2017). BPP is sometimes referred to as ‘the benefiting view’ or the ‘wrongful benefit principle’. 2 For BPP and climate justice, see, e.g., Shue (1999); Gosseries (2004); Caney (2005); Page (2012); LawfordSmith (2014). 3 Lippert-Rasmussen (2017, pp. 81–86) makes further illuminating distinctions relating to how the baseline of comparison is set. 4 For cases where the beneficiaries are not morally innocent, see Pasternak (2014) and Goodin and Pasternak (2016). Benefiting from Injustice and the Common-Source Problem 1069 harmful act or policy—between victims and beneficiaries. This means that the principle is, as I shall also say, ‘source sensitive’. Source sensitivity with respect to benefiting from injustice may seem intuitively plausible, but advocates of BPP regularly omit to explain why it is important, and several critics have recently argued that it is in fact normatively irrelevant.5 Worse, they maintain that it leads BPP into making mistaken recommendations (Knight 2013; Huseby 2015; Parr 2016; LippertRasmussen 2017).6 These two claims are intertwined. The charge is that BPP results in various kinds of unfairness because it mistakenly assumes that common sources matter. To see what the critics have in mind, consider the case Carl Knight (2013, p. 587) calls Unfortunate. Unfortunate. In her dying moment, Wrongdoer unjustly harms Victim and, as a result of this, Beneficiary innocently benefits. When Victim is harmed, she becomes as badly off as Unfortunate, who suffers from s (...truncated)