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Contributing and Benefiting: Two Grounds for Duties to the Victims of Injustice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Norbert Anwander
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Extract

Contrasting his own position with that of those who conceive the moral challenge of global poverty in terms of a positive duty to help, Thomas Pogge suggests that “we may be failing to fulfill our stringent negative duty not to uphold injustice, not to contribute to or profit from [emphasis added] the unjust impoverishment of others” (p. 197). We should conceive of our individual donations and of possible institutionalized initiatives to eradicate poverty not as helping the poor but “as protecting them from the effects of global rules whose injustice benefits us and is our responsibility” (p. 23, emphasis added). Pogge also claims that such activities should be understood in terms of compensation: “The word ‘compensate’ is meant to indicate that how much one should be willing to contribute toward reforming unjust institutions and toward mitigating the harms they cause depends on how much one is contributing to, and benefiting from, their maintenance” (p. 50, emphasis added).

In characterizing wrongful involvement in an unjust social order and the compensatory duties that arise from it, Pogge refers to the terms contribution/responsibility as well as to benefit/profit (the latter are used interchangeably). The first of these factors is unobjectionable: we can take it for granted that there is a negative duty not to contribute to injustice and that those who are responsible for harmful institutions should compensate their victims. I want to raise doubts, however, about the role that Pogge assigns to benefiting from injustice in the determination of our duties toward the victims of injustice. I shall do so by challenging his claim that there is a negative duty not to benefit from injustice, and that the role that benefiting from injustice plays in determining our duties to work toward reforming unjust practices and mitigating their harmful effects is best understood in terms of compensation.

Type
Response To World Poverty and Human Rights
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 39 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2005

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References

1 Pogge, Thomas W., World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002Google Scholar). All in-text citation references are to this book.

2 We should not read Pogge as simply making the uncontroversial empirical claim that benefiting from injustice tends to go along with contributing to it: first, this reading does not fit the disjunctive “or” in the passage on p. 197; second, the proposed measure for compensation (p. 50) appears to attribute a distinct role to benefit; and third, in his chapter, “Assisting” the Global Poor, in Chatterjee, Deen K., ed., The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 260–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Pogge explicitly mentions two distinct negative duties (p. 278).

3 In his “Review of Thomas Pogge, World Hunger [sic] and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms” Ethics 113 (2003), pp. 907–11, Hugh LaFollete attributes to Pogge the position “that those of us in affluent nations have harmed the impoverished of the world by supporting, sustaining, and benefiting from a global order that bars their secure access to the basic necessities of life” (p. 908, emphasis added). On my account, it is not strictly true that by benefitingwe have harmed them and therefore acted wrongly. It is most probably true, however, both that supporting and sustaining the unjust global order has been to our benefit, and that by acting in ways that profit us we have supported and sustained it.

4 Pogge, “Assisting” the Global Poor, p. 278, emphasis added.

5 Ibid., pp. 278–79Google Scholar.

6 Ibid.

7 Another issue that may influence our thinking here is benefit sharing, the idea that benefits should be shared fairly among those who have made contributions to them. It may be this idea that explains, e.g., the judgment that beyond returning what is not ours, we may not keep all the profits that have accrued to us from our use of a stolen good. It would be quite misleading, however, to think of this in terms of compensation. Since benefit sharing is not essentially about benefits derived from injustice, we should treat the questions it raises separately.

8 This is just a sketch. I develop this view and provide an account of the positive duties generated by benefiting from harm in an unpublished paper with Barbara Bleisch, “Profiting from Harm,” Ethics Centre, University of Zurich. We also discuss in further detail whether, qua benefiting, it is ever wrong to benefit from harm suffered by others.