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Centre for Consciousness

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Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory

Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences

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HomeUpcoming EventsChristian Barry (ANU) & David Wiens (ANU): Benefiting From Wrongdoing and Preserving Wrongful Harm
Christian Barry (ANU) & David Wiens (ANU): Benefiting from wrongdoing and preserving wrongful harm

Some moral theorists argue that we can incur special duties to victims of a wrongdoing simply in virtue of receiving benefits that are causally downstream of the wrongdoing, even if we are wholly innocent of the wrongdoing. These arguments aim to show that benefiting constitutes a ground of moral duties that is independent of other familiar grounds, such as capability to assist, special relationship to the victim, or contribution to the wrongdoing. Consequently, they rely entirely on cases where innocent beneficiaries plausibly have special duties to the victims of wrongdoing. But there are cases where it would be implausible to charge innocent beneficiaries with a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing. Our aim in this paper is to develop a criterion that distinguishes cases of benefiting-with-duty from cases of benefiting-without-duty. Our criterion not only divides cases in an intuitively plausible way; it also provides a general explanation for why innocent beneficiaries incur a duty to use the benefits they receive to address the victim's hardship -- to fail to do so would preserve wrongful harm. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also yields a compelling diagnosis of reasonable disagreement on borderline cases.

Date & time

  • Tue 04 Jun 2013, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location

Coombs Seminar Room B

Event Series

Philsoc seminars