Taking advantage of injustice

Canadian journal of philosophy, 2007

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.

2009

© 2009 Mikhail Valdman T ypically, we consider mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults to be legitimate and binding, especially if third parties are unaffected. Yet such transactions can be deeply exploitative. Suppose, for instance, that I fall over the side of a cruise ship and the sole witness demands an exorbitant price for throwing me a life preserver. If I accept his offer, this transaction would be mutually beneficial and, arguably, consensual. Still, it would be deeply exploitative and deeply wrong, and our agreement’s bindingness would be open to question. In this paper I attempt to explain what exploitation is, when it is wrong, and what makes it so. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to t...

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2021

In some quarters, the focus of unjust enrichment scholarship has shifted from loss and gain towards the defendant’s ‘involvement in the story’—what she has done to warrant liability. The goal of this shift is to fit unjust enrichment within the ‘doer-sufferer’ template of ‘corrective justice’ theories of private law. I argue that this shift fails to reconcile unjust enrichment with the commitment to equal freedom upon which these theories depend. But we can justify restitution without forsaking the Kantian concern with rational agency. In this article, I endorse a contractualist approach to mistaken payments: a particular use of the state’s coercive power is just if it is one that everyone could rationally choose; everyone could rationally choose a rule placing the burden of risk for mistake with payees, if that rule does not make any such payee worse off than she was prior to the impugned transaction. https://academic.oup.com/ojls/article-abstract/41/1/114/6018007?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Social Theory and Practice, 2025

I argue that certain special obligations members of certain marginalized groups have to one another, if any such obligations exist, cannot be explained in terms of reciprocity. First, I motivate reciprocity of the oppressed (RO)-the term I've coined for the view that members of a particular marginalized social group have special obligations, corresponding to perfect duties, to one another grounded in reciprocity. Then, I argue that RO can, at most, generate special obligations, corresponding to imperfect duties, for members of certain marginalized groups. After, I clarify what sorts of obligations reciprocity could generate for members of certain marginalized groups and, in doing so, show that RO can vindicate only modest conclusions about the duties that members of a marginalized group have to one another.

Ethics & international affairs, 2005

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2021

Some normative theorists believe that there is a principled moral reason not to retain benefits realized by injustice or wrongdoing. However, critics have argued that this idea is implausible. One purported problem is that the idea lacks an obvious rationale and that attempts to provide one have been unconvincing. This paper articulates and defends the idea that the principled reason in question has an expressive quality: it gets its reasongiving force from the symbolic aptness of such an act as an expressive response to wrongdoing. The paper thus argues that at least in a certain subset of cases, renouncing benefits realized by injustice amounts to a powerful and uniquely apt expression of protest against the disrespect for the victim that is implied by the wrongdoer’s actions. The paper shows how this idea can inform the question of reparations for slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Lastly it develops an important objection to the argument presented and gives an account of how this objection can be met.

2014

This dissertation is about economic inequality and why it thrives in a country with professedly egalitarian values. I propose that people's economic behavior and policy preferences are largely driven by their understanding of deservingness. So long as a person believes that their compatriots are generally served their economic due, economic outcomes require no tampering, at least on moral grounds. People may tolerate grave inequalities &mdash inequalities that trouble them, even &mdash if they think those inequalities are deserved. Indeed, if outcomes appear deserved, altering them constitutes an unjust act. Resources meted to the undeserving, conversely, require correction. To begin, I show how desert unifies behavioral research into the otherwise disparate notions of justice that social scientists usually cite. Desert I treat as a social institution, one that helps resolve a common multiple-equilibria problem: the allocation of wealth and socioeconomic station. As a natural ph...