A Benefit Argument for Responsibilities to Rectify Injustice

Ethics & international affairs, 2005

Canadian journal of philosophy, 2007

Philosophy Compass, 2024

In this paper, I assess critically the recent debate on corrective duties across moral and legal philosophy. Two prominent positions have emerged: the Kantian rights-based view (holding that what triggers corrections is a failure to respect others' right to freedom) and the so-called continuity view (correcting means attempting to do what one was supposed to do before). Neither position, I try to show, offers a satisfactory explanation of the ground (why correct?) and content (how to correct?) of corrective duties. In the final section, I suggest that it is probably better to restrict the label "corrective duties" to duties generated by interpersonal wronging.

Diritto e Questioni Pubbliche, 12/2012: 39-74., 2012

In this paper I argue that Coleman’s mixed conception of corrective justice is subject to three important objections. First, it does not offer an explanation of the normative structure of tort law. The values of responsibility and concern for human well-being, on which Coleman grounds the practice of tort law, are not enough to justify its bilateral structure. Moreover, I suggest that the mixed conception does not offer a sufficiently deep analysis of the practice that might have explanatory power. Second, the mixed conception cannot account for all cases of strict liability. Coleman’s argument reconstructs strict liability for risky activities as part of the fault principle. This goes against conventional wisdom, according to which strict liability regulates lawful activities, and fault liability is always imposed for wrongful actions. Finally, Coleman neglects the distributive aspect of tort law. As a result, he misses the importance of liability rules in creating the scheme of primary rights and duties that regulates private interactions. On the other hand, I offer a new account of tort law that is immune to these objections and at the same time is able to accommodate the significance of human wellbeing and individual responsibility.

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.

2018

What is a duty of justice? And how is it different from a duty of beneficence? We need a clear account of the contrast. Unfortunately, there is no consensus in the philosophical literature as to how to characterize it. Different articulations of it have been provided, but it is hard to identify a common core that is invariant across them. In this paper, I propose an account of how to understand duties of justice, explain how it contrasts with several proposals as to how to distinguish justice and beneficence, respond to some objections and suggest further elaborations of it. The conceptual exploration pursued in this paper has practical stakes. A central aim is to propose and defend a capacious concept of justice that makes a direct discussion of important demands of justice (domestic and global) possible. Duties of justice can be positive besides negative, they can be imperfect as well as perfect, they can range over personal besides institutional contexts, they can include multiple associative reasons such us non-domination, nonexploitation and reciprocity, and they can even go beyond existing national, political, and economic associative frameworks to embrace strictly universal humanist concerns. We should reject ideological abridgments of the concept of justice that render these possibilities, and the important human interests and claims they may foster, invisible.

Philosophy in Review, 2012

Responsibility and Distributive Justice is a collection of 13 new, high-quality essays written by some of the most well-known philosophers working on responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism (RSE) or, more generally, in the field of distributive justice. It will be of particular interest to those who already have a good understanding of the relevance of responsibility to distributive justice, and are keen to keep up to date with the debate or are interested in responsibility's relevance to a particular topic, e.g., health care policy. Richard J. Arneson's essay, which opens the collection, is the only contribution that would be particularly useful to those new to the field of RSE, as it helps to provide an overview of some of the most significant distinctions. Arneson breaks luck egalitarianism (as RSE is often called) down into the components of 'luckism' and 'egalitarianism', highlighting different aspects of each of these components-such as whether we require equality, priority to the worst off, or sufficiency-and he briefly sketches some criticisms of RSE and potential rebuttals.

Responsibility and Distributive Justice, edited by Carl Knight and Zofia Stemplowska. Oxford University Press, 2011

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the recent debate about responsibility and distributive justice. It traces the recent philosophical focus on distributive justice to John Rawls and examines two arguments in his work which might be taken to contain the seeds of the focus on responsibility in later theories of distributive justice. It examines Ronald Dworkin's ‘equality of resources’, the ‘luck egalitarianism’ of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, as well as the criticisms of their work put forward by Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, and Jonathan Wolff. Key concepts such as responsibility (individual and collective), luck (thin and thick; brute and option), control, desert, and equality of opportunity are delineated, and the implementation of responsibility-sensitive accounts of justice is considered. The chapters of this book are positioned in relation to the wider literature on responsibility and distributive justice, and a brief outline of the chapters is provided.

Politics, 2000