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Moral Judgment and the Duties of Innocent Beneficiaries of Injustice

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. We limited our participant pool to MTurk users with a 98% or better approval rating for their work who were located in the United States. Participants were not allowed to take more than one of these experiments. The initial number of participants was limited to 50 for each experiment. Upon beginning the study, participants received a randomly generated code that they would have to enter at the end of the study in order for their results to be counted. The task used sliders that ranged from “0” to “10000” with notches at each thousand mark. Because participants could not see the precise totals they were selecting for each recipient, we eliminated participants whose total distributed benefits were $1000 above or below the $10,000 total. There were 47 participants in Experiment 1, with 2 participants excluded for going over and 1 participant excluded for going under the $10,000 total by $1000 or more.

  2. The vertical order of the appearance of the sliders in each experiment was randomized to control for possible order effects.

  3. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we discuss this point.

  4. Repeated-measures ANOVA with the Greenhouse–Geisser correction, F(1.497, 68.880) = 6.339, p = .006, η 2 = .12.

  5. Paired samples, t(46) = 4.97, p < .001.

  6. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  7. χ2(1) = 6.721, p = .01. The remaining 8.5% (95% CI [1%, 16%]) thought that the beneficiary could keep all of the benefits for himself. These participants should not be counted either in favor of the benefiting view or the luck egalitarian view, and hence were not included in this comparison.

  8. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging us to respond this potential objection and the next one.

  9. There were 48 participants in Experiment 2, with two participants excluded for going more than $1000 over the total possible amount of benefits to be distributed.

  10. Repeated-measures ANOVA with the Greenhouse–Geisser correction, F(1.609, 75.634) = 11.855, p < .001, η 2 = .20.

  11. Paired samples, t(47) = 5.05, p < .001. They also thought that the innocent beneficiary should give significantly more to the victim of the injustice that he benefited from than he should keep for himself (M = 2748.40, SD = 2492.89), Paired samples, t(47) = 3.09, p = .003.

  12. χ2(1) = 8.333, p = .004.

  13. For Goodin’s taxonomy of basic responses to wrongs, see Goodin 2013: 480.

  14. Of course, Goodin’s view could be paired with a further principle stipulating that innocent beneficiaries in such cases must give, or give more of, the benefits they currently hold to victims of the injustice. But Goodin doesn’t include such a principle in his account, and claims to be giving a taxonomy of responses to benefiting from injustice. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging us to clarify this point.

  15. There were 42 participants in Experiment 3, with 6 participants excluded for going over and 2 excluded for going under the $10,000 total by $1000 or more.

  16. Repeated-measures ANOVA with the Greenhouse–Geisser correction, F(2.4, 97.83) = 6.605, p = .001, η 2 = .14.

  17. Paired-samples, t(41) = 3.365, p = .002.

  18. Paired-samples, t(41) = 3.484, p = .001.

  19. Paired-samples, t(41) = 3.500, p = .001.

  20. χ2(1) = .100, p = .75. As with the similar comparison in Experiment 1, this comparison included only participants who judged that the beneficiary should give each of the disadvantaged parties at least some of the benefits (in Experiment 2, all of the participants did so). For ease of exposition, we will drop this qualification in describing the results of Experiment 4.

  21. Among the participants who selected some amount for the two victims of injustice and the unfortunate person, only one participant selected the exact same amount for all three of these recipients, but this is perfectly compatible with the idea of disgorgement. The fact that a beneficiary must give up their benefits doesn’t imply that they have to give the same amounts to people who have been disadvantaged by different causes.

  22. For a well-known discussion of compensation in terms of indifference see Nozick 1974.

  23. There were 47 participants in Experiment 4, with 2 participants excluded for going over and 1 excluded for going under the $10,000 total by $1000 or more.

  24. Repeated-measures ANOVA with the Greenhouse–Geisser correction, F(2.708, 124.549) = 4.238, p = .009, η 2 = .08.

  25. Paired-samples, t(46) = 2.717, p = .009.

  26. Paired-samples, t(46) = 3.661, p = .001.

  27. χ2(1) = 2.077, p = .15.

  28. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we address this point.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Matthew Lindauer & Christian Barry

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  1. Matthew Lindauer
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  2. Christian Barry
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Correspondence to Matthew Lindauer.

Additional information

We have benefited from presentations of earlier versions of this paper to members of the Yale Experimental Philosophy Lab (October 2014) and audiences at the Conference in Honor of Gerhard Øverland (“Responding to Global Poverty – On what the Affluent Ought to Do and what the Poor are Permitted to Do,” May 2015) and the Workshop on the Beneficiary Pays Principle (May 2016) at the University of Oslo. For helpful discussion, we are grateful to Thom Brooks, Dan Butt, Garrett Cullity, Bashshar Haydar, Robert Huseby, Robert Kirby, Ole Koksvik, Holly Lawford-Smith, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Brandon Liverence, Avia Pasternak, Mark Sheskin, Aysu Suben, Kevin Tobia, Patrick Tomlin, and Alec Walen. For helpful written comments, we would like to thank Florian Cova, Bob Goodin, Serene Khader, Josh Knobe, and two anonymous reviewers for the journal.

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Lindauer, M., Barry, C. Moral Judgment and the Duties of Innocent Beneficiaries of Injustice. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 671–686 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0329-9

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