Justice and beneficence

Abstract

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, non-exploitation, 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.

Keywords:

• justice
• beneficence
• global justice
• duties
• rights
• feasibility

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments or conversations I thank referees, Arash Abizadeh, Elizabeth Ashford, Charles Beitz, Rainer Forst, Francisco Garcia Gibson, Mariano Garreta-Leclercq, Waheed Hussain, Carl Knight, Rahul Kumar, Barbara Herman, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Alistair Macleod, Julio Montero, Mark Nelson, Henry Richardson, Andrea Sangiovanni, Peter Singer, Laura Valentini, Alex Voorhoeve, and participants in colloquia at the Centro de Investigaciones Filosoficas (Buenos Aires), Princeton University Center for Human Values, Queen’s University, University of Montreal, and Glasgow University. My research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. For the distinction between concept and conception see Rawls (1999a, p. 5) and Hart (1994, pp. 160, 246).

2. The phrases ‘conditions and goods,’ ‘entitlements,’ ‘rights,’ and ‘duties,’ are broad enough to allow for whatever a conception takes to be the distributively relevant (e.g. they allow comparative considerations about the standing of persons in relation to others).

3. Some such features (even if they do not all apply in every case) may mark the ‘family resemblance’ among duties of justice. On ‘family resemblance’ see Wittgenstein (2009, sects. 65–67). The use of this approach might make a proposal less open to challenge via counterexamples. The latter can be seen as identifying borderline cases that lie beyond the core of the concept. For deployments of this strategy, see Section 4.

4. For the point that justice concerns giving each person their due, see Wiggins (2006, Lecture 10) and Cohen (2008, p. 7). For elucidation and critical discussion of contrasts II through V, see Buchanan (1987). For a presentation of contrasts IV and V, see Miller (2007, pp. 248, 249). See also Miller (1999, p. 76): ‘One test of the distinction between justice and humanity is whether those in need are regarded as having enforceable claims to the resources that will meet their needs, and correspondingly whether potential donors are regarded as being under enforceable obligations to provide those resources.’ An example of contrast VI appears in Tan (2004, p. 21). Tan actually focuses on the related question of the distinction between ‘justice’ and ‘ethics,’ claiming (on the basis of an interpretation of Rawls’s theory of justice) that the former has an ‘institutional focus,’ while the latter has an ‘interactional focus.’ Tan distinguishes his view from Pogge’s view, according to which an ‘institutional approach not only has an institutional focus, but it also has an institutional basis or justification,’ and he does not ‘share the justificatory claim in Pogge’s approach that we have duties of justice only in so far as we are causally via our institutions responsible for injustices’ (Ibid.). For Pogge’s view, see his (2008). Rawls (1999b, pp. 195ff.) contrasts distributive justice and humanitarian assistance. Contrast VII is embraced by the majority of philosophers in the current debate on global justice (although the normatively relevant forms of association are characterized in different ways – see notes 27 and 28 below). For challenges to it see, however, Caney (2011) and Gilabert (2012, chs. 5, 6). My discussion focuses on contemporary debates. For historical explorations, see Fleischacker (2004); and Nussbaum (2000).

5. Gilabert (2012, pp. 11–18). This paper differs from that earlier text in the following ways: an account of deliberative interpretive proposals is advanced, the characterization of justice is changed to include reference to access to goods and conditions rather than merely to advantages, the list of desiderata is explicitly stated and is expanded to include determinateness and illumination of practices, the contrast associative / non-associative is added, the arguments defending the proposed characterization of justice are rephrased to make them sharper and additional arguments are advanced. The final section of this paper takes the discussion further by addressing possible challenges and by providing further elaborations of the proposed characterization of justice. Finally, this paper does not endorse a deflationary conclusion about the importance of the distinction between justice and beneficence.

6. Swift (2006, p. 6).

7. Nozick (1981, pp. 498–504). As Francisco Garcia Gibson pointed out to me, considerations about costs to agents may affect duties of justice in different ways (e.g. by impacting their content, weight, or enforceability).

8. Rawls (1999a, pp. 266, 267).

9. See e.g. Van Parijs (2007, p. 641).

10. For the libertarian view, see Nozick (1974) and Narveson (1988).

11. Buchanan (1987, pp. 562–569).

12. Rawls (1999a, pp. 249–251, 291, 292).

13. Miller (2007, p. 249).

14. Cohen (2008, ch. 3). See also Sen (2009, pp. x, xi, 10, 67–69, 75–86).

15. See Cohen (2002). See also Rawls (1999a, sect. 41).

16. Another instructive example is Gramsci’s view that socialist transformations in the Western democratic societies are only likely to succeed if socialist activists manage to make their values and demands hegemonic within the sphere of civil society before they find realization through state action. See Gramsci’s discussion on the phenomenon of hegemony within civil society in Gramsci (2000, pp. 195, 205, 206, 211, 212, 249, 306, 307, 333, 334, 345).

17. A similar skepticism might partly explain why it is a good thing that the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women ranges over ‘the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field’ (Article 1). Part of the difficulty of this discussion turns on how to handle the distinction between what constitutes and what causes justice. See Cohen (2008, pp. 377–381).

18. I agree with Waldron (1993, pp. 25, 212) that rights generate ‘waves of duties’ of many kinds.

19. On the role of courts in getting the political process to acknowledge and specify rights, see Gauri and Brinks (2012).

20. Rawls (1999a, pp. 99, 293, 294).

21. The natural duty of justice has another part that concerns the obligation to support existing just schemes. A critic might say that this part connects only to perfect obligations. But this would be a mistake. One aspect of the duty to support just schemes, the obligation to obey just laws, is a perfect duty. But the members of a just scheme have a wider, imperfect obligation to actively engage in activities that help keep the just arrangements alive, such as voting (when it is not legally mandatory), participating in political parties, public debates.

22. For elucidation and exploration of the category of ‘dynamic duties,’ see Gilabert (2009, 2011b).

23. Shue (1988); and Gilabert (2010).

24. Furthermore, institutional structures sometimes create certain roles, and thus give rise to specific interests and responsibilities (Leif Wenar, ‘Justice and Charity. Rawls, Roles, and Rights’ – Talk delivered in the workshop ‘Justice and Beneficence.’ Princeton University, 9 November 2012).

25. These arrangements would include certain conventions (including those of language). These are of course, in one sense of the term, ‘institutional facts.’ But I am here focusing on more formalized institutions whose rules are shaped and applied in a way that involves top-down command, without requiring the direct consent and control on the part of (at least some of) their subjects when they are applied.

26. For a historical study of the emergence of this idea, from Babeuf to Rawls (and their surrounding political contexts), see Fleischacker (2004, ch. 3). See also Miller (1999). Miller suggests that socialist challenges to capitalism played an important role in the emergence of the contemporary idea of ‘social justice’ (p. 3). On socialist justice, see Gilabert (2015).

27. Nagel (2005).

28. Cohen and Sabel (2006); Sangiovanni (2007); and Miller (2010).

29. Just as we can recognize agent-neutral besides agent-relative duties in the case of human rights, we can acknowledge both kinds of duties in the case of some egalitarian claims. See Buchanan (2004); Caney (2011); and Gilabert (2012). For a different, ‘practical’ characterization of human rights that does not rely on a humanist approach see Beitz (2009). Gilabert (2011a, 2013) argue that the insights of such a view can, and should, be combined with the humanist approach.

30. The problem of the imperfection of duties in fact involves many possibilities depending on what aspect of a duty we focus on. The difficulties may be to identify the duties’ corresponding (a) agents, (b) acts or omissions, (c) beneficiaries, or (d) circumstances of application.

31. For other discussions on claimability, see the specific proposal by O’Neill (1996), and the criticisms to it by Sen, (2004) and Ashford (2007).

32. This does not involve obliterating the distinctions between different kinds of duties of justice (negative and positive, general and associative, and the different varieties of each). They can and should all be articulated. The key point is that their mutual relations become an explicit and necessary target of discussion.

33. Cohen (2008, pp. 289, 290, n.14) reports Joseph Raz’s puzzlement on this score. Some authors claim that the reference to justice does not add anything fundamental to a full account of moral duties, and that it is in fact wholly derivative. See Kagan (1998, pp. 176, 177) and Buchanan (1987, pp. 574, 575).

34. It also does not obliterate (and in fact invites the grasp of) different reasons of justice. See note 32 (and surrounding text).

35. Thus, Peter Singer construes the positive duty to help reduce global poverty as a matter of beneficence (on the basis of the famous analogy with the duty to rescue a child drowning in a shallow pond). See Singer (1972). But we can construe this positive duty as a demand of justice. We could then preempt the common reaction (e.g. by officials of governments of wealthy nations) that attending to this duty must wait until other, more stringent demands of justice have been taken care of first.

36. Forst (2012, p. 4).

37. I owe this example to Peter Singer (who does not, however, support my account of the distinction between justice and beneficence).

38. I think that this should include recognizing a right to participate in the political regulation of practices of production and distribution. For this important point, see Forst (2012, p. 4).