Abstract
It is common to focus on the duties of the wrongdoer in cases that involve injustice. Presumably, the wrongdoer owes her victim an apology for having wronged her and perhaps compensation for having harmed her. But, these are not the only duties that may arise. Are other beneficiaries of an injustice permitted to retain the fruits of the injustice? If not, who becomes entitled to those funds? In recent years, the Connection Account has emerged as an influential account that purports to explain cases such as Embezzlement. This account holds that benefiting from injustice can give rise to a corrective duty - that is, a duty of compensation - owed specifically to the victim of the injustice from which the recipient benefits. This duty is grounded in the connection between the victim and the beneficiary of a given injustice. This paper has two aims. First, I show that we must reject the Connection Account on the grounds that it risks failing correctly to identify those who become entitled to the fruits of injustice. I achieve this by developing and defending the fairness objection. Second, I offer an alternative account: the Moral Taintedness Account. This account states that, when identifying who is entitled to the fruits of injustice, the cause and the degree of the harm suffered by a victim are both relevant considerations, though it does not matter whether the victim is the victim of the injustice that gave rise to the fruits in question. This account avoids the problem associated with the Connection Account, and yields intuitive conclusions in an important range of test cases.
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Notes
By ‘a case that involves an injustice’ I (stipulatively) mean ‘a case that involves wrongdoing’. Throughout, I use these two terms interchangeably.
Throughout, I use ‘permitted’ to refer to ‘morally permitted’ rather than, say, ‘legally permitted’ or ‘prudentially permitted’. This clarification applies also to my use of ‘entitled’, ‘ought’, ‘required’, etc.
The theory Butt draws upon is defended in Miller (2001, 469).
The duty to correct for the harmful effects of an injustice is a close cousin of the duty of rescue, which states that an individual may be duty-bound to prevent something bad from happening (such as to prevent a child from drowning in a pond) when she can do so by bearing a cost that is significantly smaller than the magnitude of the benefit in question. The duty to correct for the harmful effects of an injustice is distinct from the duty of rescue, since it may require an individual to provide a benefit to another who is not badly off (though they are worse off than otherwise as a result of injustice) and who is no longer facing a threat.
There is a version of this case in which Wrongdoer acts only on the condition that she is able to embezzle funds from both accounts. Under these conditions, there is a sense in which Recipient benefits from both injustices, since each is necessary for her to receive the embezzled funds. The complications that this raises are important, but they are beyond the scope of my inquiry. For this reason, I want to put them aside and to focus on when this is not the case.
Of course, there are further complications. See Swadling (2008).
I take this example from Goodin and Barry (2014), where it is discussed at length.
The same kind of reply is sometimes offered to those who point to the unfairness generated by associative duties. See Kolodny (2002).
I say ‘may’ since there is a separate question, which I do not attempt to answer, about whether or not Recipient has the appropriate standing to enforce this duty.
Goodin puts pressure on the idea that Recipient may permissibly deny transferring all of the funds to Victim 1, as I have suggested. He claims: ‘When a car has been stolen from someone who is undeservedly rich, we think that the police should nonetheless return the car to its rightful owner rather giving it to someone else who needs it more’ (2013, 479). It is not clear to me, though, that this is always the correct conclusion. Indeed, if the original owner of the car is ‘undeservedly rich’, she may not be its ‘rightful owner’ at all. When this is the case, she may have an enforceable duty to use the car to serve other ends (say, by selling it and donating the revenue). Here, it may be permissible for the police to enforce this duty rather than to return the care to its original owner.
Perhaps the additional duties reply does not completely trivialise the Connection Account, since there may remain a weak expressive reason to keep the two duties apart, as the Connection Account does. See Kolodny (2002, 253–4).
Strictly speaking, the Moral Taintedness Account posits a conditional duty to avoid benefiting from an injustice. In particular, an agent is under a duty to avoid benefiting from an injustice only if doing so it not wasteful. This qualification is important as it enables the Moral Taintedness Account to avoid a version of the levelling-down objection. In a case in which an agent can avoid benefiting from injustice only by burning the fruits of injustice (say, because the goods cannot be transferred), she is not under a duty to avoid benefiting from injustice.
I take this term from Goodin (2013, 487).
I remain deliberately ambiguous about what counts as the intended result of injustice. For example, let us consider a variation of Embezzlement in which Wrongdoer intends to benefit Accomplice but accidently benefits Recipient. Are these fruits of injustice morally tainted in the relevant sense? I do not attempt to answer this question.
I leave open the question of what counts as an immoral plan, as well as whether we should treat differently different kinds of immoral plans. For simplicity, I focus on paradigmatic cases that involve wrongfully using someone as a mere means.
For a related, though distinct, view, see Haydar and Øverland (2014, 356–8).
This, I think, is the kind of view endorsed in Goodin (2013, esp. 479).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 11th Graduate Pavia Conference in Political Philosophy and at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Ethics, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Warwick. I am grateful to those audiences for their feedback. For helpful written comments, I also thank David Axelsteak, Paul Bou-Habib, Clare Burgum, Matthew Clayton, Dimple Patel, Adam Slavny, Adam Swift, and Andrew Williams, as well as two anonymous referees for this journal.
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Parr, T. The Moral Taintedness of Benefiting from Injustice. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 985–997 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9706-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9706-9