Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

I will discuss the relationship between two different accounts of remedial duty ascriptions. According to one account, the beneficiary account, individuals who benefit innocently from injustices ought to bear remedial responsibilities towards the victims of these injustices. According to another account, the causal account, individuals who caused injustices ought to bear remedial duties towards the victim. In this paper, I examine the relation between the principles central to these accounts: the Beneficiary Pays Principle and the well-established principle of Strict Liability (...) in law. I argue that both principles display a strong yet unexplored similarity as they make certain kinds of causal connection sufficient for incurring liability. Because of this similarity, I suggest that insights into the Beneficiary Pays Principle can be gained from exploring its relation with Strict Liability. In particular, I examine two new positive arguments that could be adapted to support of the Beneficiary Pays Principle: the Minimising Injustice Argument and the Normative Connection Argument. However, I’ll show that only one of those arguments, namely the Normative Connection Argument, can truly support the Beneficiary Pays Principle. I conclude that, if you endorse the Normative Connection Argument for Strict Liability, you have at least a strong prima facie reason to endorse the parallel argument for the Beneficiary Pays Principle. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary-pays principle . This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change and as a normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

Many theorists claim that if an agent benefits from an action that harms others, that agent has a moral duty to compensate those who are harmed, even if the agent did not cause the harm herself. In the debate on climate justice, this idea is commonly referred to as the beneficiary-pays principle. This paper argues that the BPP is implausible, both in the context of climate change and as a normative principle more generally. It should therefore be rejected.

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This paper proposes that the “beneficiary pays principle” may be grounded in a brand of respect for autonomy. I first argue that on one understanding, such respect implies that as far as we are not morally required to make some sacrifice in service of some purpose, we each have legitimate authority to ourselves decide the purposes for which we should make sacrifices. I then argue that the problem with retaining benefits realized by imposed sacrifices, which the victim was not required (...) to make in order to realize the benefits in question, is that doing so is disrespectful of the victim’s autonomy. (shrink)

This article uses philosopher Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice to shed light on the legal concept of the fiduciary, alongside demonstrating the wider contribution Fricker’s work can make to business ethics. Fiduciary, from the Latin fīdūcia, meaning “trust,” plays a fundamental role in all financial and business organisations: it acts as a moral safeguard of the relationship between trustee and beneficiary. The article focuses on the ethics of the fiduciary, but from a unique historical perspective, referring back to the (...) original formulation of the fiduciary within a familial context to investigate presuppositions regarding agential capabilities, whilst also paying attention to the power mechanism embedded in the trustee–beneficiary relationship. Using Fricker’s theory of pre-emptive testimonial injustice, the analysis elucidates the impact of cumulative beneficiary silencing in contemporary contexts, and the article uncovers ethical issues of an epistemological kind at the core of the fiduciary—of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help the poor without requiring them to recognize their causal role in the creation of the (...) abhorrent conditions they seek to remedy. Tracing how the beneficiary has manifested itself in the work of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Naomi Klein, and others, Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism. There are no easy answers to the question of how to confront systematic inequality on a global scale. But the first step, Robbins suggests, is to acknowledge that we are, in fact, beneficiaries. (shrink)

The paper shows relationships between the characteristics of residents and the places, where they live. A combination of three criteria of place attractiveness was chosen to classify places, and profiles of their beneficiaries on the theoretical level. The results of the empirical study partially con­firm the developed theoretical typologies. Two methods to segment place market are equal only if expectations of population are constant. Study results allow place marketers to identify emerging shifts in the structure of beneficiaries of (...) specific places and predict their further evolution. (shrink)

This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced to justify imposing risks of collateral harm on prospective beneficiaries of armed humanitarian interventions. This argument - the ‘Beneficiary Principle’ - holds that non-liable individuals’ immunity to being harmed as a side effect of just armed humanitarian interventions may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from the intervention. Against this, I defend the view that beneficiary status does not morally distinguish beneficiaries from other non-liable individuals in (...) such a way as to permit exposing them to greater risks of being harmed. The argument proceeds in four steps. I first show that the BP can neither be grounded in liability-based nor in lesser-evil justifications for harming. I then argue that a standalone justification for unintended harming based on beneficiary status would face at least two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP’s applicability to collectives; the second questions the normative weight we can plausibly ascribe to beneficiary status when beneficiaries are such by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm. I argue that standing to benefit is morally irrelevant when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms, and consequently suggest that the BP may only serve as a distributive principle in allocating risks of harm if it is disambiguated in a number of critical aspects and applied in a more narrowlydefined set of circumstances. (shrink)

Research on the nutrition transition often treats dietary changes as an outcome of increased trade and urban living. The Northern Food Crisis presents a puzzle since it involves hunger and changing diets, but coincides with a European ban on trade in seal products. I look to insights from economic sociology and decolonizing scholarship to make sense of the ban on seal products and its impacts. I examine how trade arrangements enact power imbalances in ways that are not always obvious. I (...) explain how the ban’s exemption for Inuit-produced seal goods explicitly aims to protect Inuit from the harshness of capitalism and preserve their traditions. In this respect, the Northern Food Crisis is an embodiment of European visions of who Inuit are expected to be and how they are supposed to act in the global economy. (shrink)

This Article describes a jurisprudential puzzle—what I call the puzzle of the beneficiary’s bargain—and contends that adequately resolving this puzzle will require significant revisions to basic premises of contract law. The puzzle arises when one party enters into two contracts requiring the same performance, and the promisee of the second contract is the third-party beneficiary of the first. For example, a taxi driver contracts with a woman to transport her parents from the airport next week, and then the driver separately (...) enters a contract with the parents to transport them when the time comes. Is the second contract valid and enforceable, or does it fail for lack of consideration? This specific question—on which courts have split—implicates several important contract law doctrines. Moreover, it highlights a deep tension in our modern understanding of contractual obligation. This Article argues that adequately resolving the puzzle necessitates a general reconsideration of the relationship between rights and liability in contract law. Surprisingly, the best solution requires abandoning the foundational understanding that contract liability arises out of breach of a promisee’s right to performance. The puzzle thus offers a lens through which to examine—and even revise—the central concepts of modern contract law. (shrink)

There are longstanding calls for international organizations to be more inclusive of the voices and interests of people whose lives they affect. There is nevertheless widespread disagreement among practitioners and political theorists over who ought to be included in IO decision-making and by what means. This paper focuses on the inclusion of IOs’ ‘intended beneficiaries,’ both in principle and practice. It argues that IOs’ intended beneficiaries have particularly strong normative claims for inclusion because IOs can affect their vital (...) interests and their political agency. It then examines how these claims to inclusion might be feasibly addressed. The paper proposes a model of inclusion via representation and communication, or ‘mediated inclusion.’ An examination of existing practices in global governance reveals significant opportunities for the mediated inclusion of IOs’ intended beneficiaries, as well as pervasive obstacles. The paper concludes that the inclusion of intended beneficiaries by IOs is both appropriate and feasible. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility movement against labor abuses has gained momentum globally since the 1990s when many corporations adopted codes of conduct to regulate labor practices in their global supply chains. However, workers' participation in the process is relatively weak until very recently, when new worker empowerment programs are increasingly initiated. Using conceptual tool created by stakeholder theorists, this article examines dynamics and performance of worker participation in implementation process of codes of conduct through a case study of CSR practices of (...) Reebok at one of its footwear supplier factories in south China. Empirical data was collected during 2002-2005 through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document reviews. (shrink)

This article explores the ethical architecture of the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle, which holds that agents can come to possess remedial obligations of corrective justice to others through the involuntary receipt of benefits stemming from injustice. Advocates of the principle face challenges of both persuasion and limitation in seeking to convince those unmoved of its normative force, and to explain in which cases of benefiting from injustice it does and does not give rise to rectificatory obligations. The article considers ways in (...) which advocates of the principle might seek to win over those sceptical of its merits by employing a modified principle which sidesteps the issue of enforceability, before considering the question of whether the argument can be expanded from cases of benefiting from wrongdoing specifically to other sorts of situation where one agent involuntarily benefits from another's loss. (shrink)

The intensification of cross-sector collaboration phenomena has occurred in multiple fields of action. Organizations in the private, public, and social sectors are working together to tackle society’s most wicked problems. Some success has resulted in a generalized belief that cross-sector collaborations represent the new paradigm to manage complex problems. Yet, important knowledge gaps remain about how cross-sector alliances generate value for society, particularly to its beneficiaries. This paper answers the question: How cross-sector collaborations lead to systemic change? It uses (...) a qualitative embedded case study design. I use two general cases of alliance-based interventions in the developing country Colombia. Embedded cases within each general case identify evidence of collective action capacity of the beneficiaries. Findings identify and explain alliances’ contributions to beneficiaries’ capacity building: brokering trust and creating spaces where beneficiaries develop an emergent collective action capacity. Alliances also enable beneficiaries to enact that capacity by building bridges, circulating capitals, and buffering relationships to protect people’s initiatives. Alliances and empowered collectives of beneficiaries produce systemic change using five mechanisms: brokering trust, creating spaces, building bridges, circulating capitals, and buffering relationships. Beneficiaries increased capacity for collective action is an outcome that becomes an alliance input, leading overtime to further benefits involving systemic change. (shrink)

The view that innocent beneficiaries of injustice bear special duties to victims of injustice has recently come under attack. Luck egalitarian theorists have argued that thought experiments focusing on the way innocent beneficiaries should distribute the benefits they’ve received provide evidence against this view. The apparent special duties of innocent beneficiaries, they hold, are wholly reducible to general duties to compensate people for bad brute luck. In this paper we provide empirical evidence in defense of the view (...) that innocent beneficiaries have genuine special duties to victims of injustice. Through a series of four experiments, we show that judgments about the kinds of cases that luck egalitarian critics have provided do not undermine but rather support this view. We also explore a number of other questions that theorists working in this area have yet to discuss and provide suggestions for further research on the moral significance of benefiting from injustice. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This study explores the underlying drivers of US public pension funds’ tendency to tilt their portfolios towards companies with stronger corporate social responsibility. Studying the equity holdings of large, internally managed US state pension funds, we find evidence that the political leaning of their beneficiaries and political pressures by state politicians affect funds’ investment decisions. State pension funds from states with Democratic-leaning beneficiaries tilt their portfolios more strongly towards companies that perform well on CSR issues, and this tendency (...) is intensified when the state government is dominated by Democratic state politicians. Moreover, we find that funds which tilt their portfolios towards companies with superior CSR scores generate a slightly higher return compared with their counterparts. Overall, our findings indicate that funds align their investment choices with the financial and non-financial interests of their beneficiaries when deciding whether to incorporate CSR into their equity allocations. (shrink)

Climate change involves changes in the climate system caused by polluting human activities and the social and natural effects of these changes. The historical and anthropogenic grounds of climate change play an important role in climate justice claims. Many climate justice scholars believe that principles of climate justice should account for the historical and anthropogenic sources of climate change. Two main backward-looking principles have been proposed: the polluter pays principle (PPP) and the beneficiary pays principle (BPP). The BPP emerged in (...) the literature on climate justice in response to certain objections raised against the PPP. In this paper, I focus on two of these objections: the causation objection and the excusable ignorance objection. Defenders of the BPP have traditionally assumed that this principle is not vulnerable to those objections, which renders the BPP superior to the PPP. In this paper, I challenge this underlying assumption. My argument here is simple: moving from the PPP to the BPP in response to any of these objections might be unjustified because the BPP is affected by at least some of the considerations giving rise to these objections. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that the history of behavior that has contributed to the threat of climate change bears in a significant way on the obligations of current people. In particular, a number of philosophers have defended the Beneficiary Pays Principle, according to which those who have benefited from unjust emitting activity have a special obligation to bear costs of mitigation and adaptation. I claim that versions of the BPP that have been defended by others share a common problematic feature. (...) Specifically, they seem to limit the benefits that ground obligations under the principle to those that derive from unjust acts, and thereby implicitly deny that other ways in which individuals might benefit from injustice can ground similar duties. I argue that there is no plausible theoretical basis for this distinction. I conclude that we should take seriously a different type of principle that can be plausibly called a Beneficiary Pays Principle, according to which those who benefit from injustice, all things considered, are obligated to give up the unjust benefits that they enjoy. (shrink)

Many moral and political theorists have recently argued that the fact that an agent has innocently benefited from wrongdoing or injustice can ground special moral duties to help out the victims or simply give up the benefits. This idea is often referred to as the ‘Beneficiary Pays Principle’. This article critically assesses three recent attempts at providing a rationale for the BPP and argues that there are profound problems with each of them. It argues that even if we accept plausible (...) versions of the different normative ideas these accounts appeal to, we have no reason to accept the BPP. (shrink)

This paper develops a future-oriented and person-centred normative argument based on expectancies that is immune to most of the problems identified in the rights of future persons. The argument unfolds in four parts. The first draws on the notion of expectancies present in inheritance law and maintains that it is possible to formulate a rule of prospective beneficiaries that correlates with entitlements and legitimate claims without necessarily acquiring the status of rights. The second extends expectancies to future persons and (...) concludes that the latter can be considered present holders of such currently binding entitlements. The third section raises the question of whether democracies are bound to a principle of fidelity towards expectancies in such a way that outweighs current people’s rights in cases of conflicts. The response does not prove particularly future-beneficial in such cases. However, section four clarifies why expectancies still carry a crucial moral weight in democracies, one that is not sufficiently established by depersonalised forms of future-oriented ethics. (shrink)

This paper illuminates a typically obscured ground for rectificatory obligations: harms justified as ‘lesser evils.’ Lesser-evil harms are not the result of overall morally prohibited acts but of acts permissibly carried out to prevent significantly greater harm. The paper argues that harms caused as unintended side effects of acting on lesser-evil justifications, notably in military rescue operations, may give rise to claims to compensation, even if (1) the military acts that caused the harms in question were justified on lesser-evil grounds (...) and (2) the victims in question are no worse off as a result; they may even owe their survival to the act of rescue. The paper defends three claims. First, being better off as a result of a harmful rescue than one would otherwise have been does not preclude claims to be compensated for harms suffered as a side effect. Second, identifying the relevant counterfactual for purposes of compensatory justice is sometimes a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive, matter. Rather than relying on empirical speculations about what _would_ have happened had a harm not occurred, we must, in certain cases, consider what agents _ought_ to have done. Finally, duties of compensation need not fall on those who caused the to-be-compensated harms. That infringing rights is permissible in certain cases does not imply that no compensation is owed, but merely that it is not necessarily rights-infringers on whom duties of compensation fall. (shrink)

Although many organizations around the world have engaged in corporate social responsibility programing, there is little evidence of social impact. This is a problematic omission since many programs carry the stigma of marketing ploys used to bolster organizational image or reduce consumer skepticism. To address this issue and build on existing scholarship, the purpose of this study was to evaluate a socially responsible youth employability program in the United Kingdom. The program was developed through the foundation of a professional British (...) soccer team to bolster employability and life skills for marginalized London youth. Program funding was provided by a large multinational bank as part of their CSR agenda. This evaluation was undertaken to understand the beneficiary impacts associated with program deployment. Results from the pre-intervention/post-intervention, sequential mixed-method evaluation show statistically significant differences among several “soft” beneficiary outcomes. However, results are mixed regarding whether the “hard” outcome of employment was achieved by program participants. Qualitative findings buttress these results, indicating a high level of motivation for work, attitude enhancement, and satisfaction with program delivery. (shrink)

Volume 22, Issue 2, June 2019, Page 148-150.

On January 1, 2006, Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage was initiated. Concern was immediately voiced by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and Families USA that, in response to this program, the pharmaceutical industry may raise prices for drugs most often used by the elderly. This article examines the ethical implications of a revenue-maximizing pricing strategy in an industry in which third party financing mitigates an end product's true cost to the user. The perspectives of three stakeholder groups (...) are examined: the elderly, as consumers of prescription drugs, the pharmaceutical industry, as product manufacturer and beneficiary of derived profits, and the total U. S. population, as the ultimate payer for the program via tax revenues. Key questions explored include the relationships among price strategy and access to drugs at both the micro (Medicare cohort) and macro (total population) levels, and on drug development or enhancement. The role of profit in a capitalism-based health care system is also examined. Hospital industry impact on these same stakeholder groups in response to the original 1965 Medicare law is used to compare and contrast possible outcomes of the new drug program. It is predicted that pharmaceutical firms will mimic the hospital industry, adopting a price maximizing strategy for drugs covered by the program. In the process, a utilitarian effect occurs: the benefits of increased access and diffusion of drugs counterbalance inequities in financing Medicare Part D. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement against labor abuses has gained momentum globally since the 1990s when many corporations adopted codes of conduct to regulate labor practices in their global supply chains. However, workers' participation in the process is relatively weak until very recently, when new worker empowerment programs are increasingly initiated. Using conceptual tool created by stakeholder theorists, this article examines dynamics and performance of worker participation in implementation process of codes of conduct through a case study of CSR practices (...) of Reebok at one of its footwear supplier factories in south China. Empirical data was collected during 2002-2005 through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document reviews. (shrink)

While unethical behaviors that are intended to benefit the self are often severely punished, unethical behaviors that are intended to benefit the organization (unethical pro-organizational behaviors, UPBs) are disciplined within organizations at different levels of severity. Building on the sensemaking theoretical framework, we study how employees make sense of what the organization is like through observing what the organization has done (i.e., different levels of punishment imposed for UPBs) and how employees subsequently react to the results of sensemaking (i.e., affective (...) commitment to the organization)—increased or decreased turnover and UPB engagement intention. By conducting a vignette-based experimental study and a time-lagged field study, we find that affective commitment to the organization of observers, especially those with a high moral disengagement propensity, increases at a low-to-moderate level of punishment severity for UPBs, and decreases at a moderate-to-high level of punishment severity for UPBs. Furthermore, the impacted affective commitment to the organization subsequently leads to increase in observers’ UPB engagement (intention) and decrease in observers’ turnover intention. We also highlight implications for theory and practice. (shrink)

Modern law's response to mass atrocities vacillates equivocally in how it understands the dramatis personae to these expansive tragedies, at once extraordinary and ubiquitous. Is there any principled order to this? If not, should we care?

Drawing upon selected literature from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada we examine how Foucault's concepts of ‘episteme’, ‘rupture’ ‘parrhesia’ ‘care of the self’, and ‘problemitization’ have been applied to particular contexts of leadership development, pedagogy, nursing knowledge, and the relationship between caring and politics. Our aims are threefold: to give examples of how selected Foucauldian concepts have been taken up in practice; to clarify how we are positioned today as nurses; and to invite more nurses to engage critically with (...) historical inquiry and to engage in deep philosophical reflection about their relationship with nursing. We begin by examining the conditions and circumstances of Foucault's life, and conclude by posing the question in our subtitle to stimulate debate about the philosophical relevance of Foucauldian scholarship to nursing. (shrink)