Duties of Beneficence
Moral agents, individual and collective, are bearers of many different types of duties: there are legal duties, contractually specified duties, duties not to harm, remedial duties, and many others.
My focus in this chapter will be on duties of beneficence. In a general sense, duties of beneficence are moral duties to benefit someone or make them better off. They are typically considered to be positive duties in the sense that they require duty-bearers to take certain actions, and are contrasted with negative duties to refrain from certain actions. So, if one agent punches another in the face or dumps oil in the ocean, she has violated a negative duty she has not to harm. But if an agent passes by a drowning child or hears of a famine in her region, assuming she has the necessary capacity to help, she has a positive duty to do what she can to help. Though negative duties may have more widespread acceptance (even among libertarians and egoists), positive duties of beneficence hold a prominent position in the dominant normative theories (among them are utilitarianism, sophisticated consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, pluralistic deontological theories, etc.). That is, on almost any ethical theory, agents have a duty to rescue the drowning child or contribute to famine relief within a certain limit of risk and cost. While the existence of duties of beneficence is virtually uncontested, their thresholds and limits are still the subject of vigorous and healthy philosophical debate.In this chapter, I understand duties of beneficence in a narrower sense: not as duties to make people better off in general, but as duties to provide for each other’s most basic needs or the preconditions of our agency. Another way of putting this is that there is a distinction to be made between duties to make someone better off and duties to aid. Barbara Herman (1984) puts the distinction in a helpful way when she distinguishes between helping someone pursue their ends and enabling them to be pursuers of their ends: she calls the latter “a duty of mutual aid.” The duty to aid takes priority over the duty (if there is such a duty) to help a friend pay for a well-deserved vacation or help a stranger build a monument to their god (Scanlon 1975). This narrower duty to aid generally aligns with the commonsense usage of duties of beneficence.
How one justifies and grounds moral duties will vary depending on one’s normative commitments. I will take it as granted that there are moral duties, but I will specify briefly two preconditions of the existence of moral obligations that will be especially relevant in the debate about collective duties of beneficence. The first is the agency condition, according to which only (moral) agents can bear moral obligations. Agents can deliberate, respond, and act on the basis of reasons, so it is appropriate to hold them accountable for the actions they undertake and also to demand that they act in certain ways and follow certain norms. As will become evident, not all of the groups that we might think are subject to moral obligations are actually moral agents. So, we need to consider whether we should reject or modify the agency condition, or modify our intuitive judgments. The second is the capacity condition according to which only agents with the capacity to perform an act or meet a goal can have an obligation with respect to that act or goal. This condition is in line with the commonly accepted “ought implies can” precept. As we will see, we might agree with former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s famous assertion that “we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty” but wonder if it necessarily means that this is something we can immediately accomplish. And if this highly dispersed and unstructured group must engage in significant coordination and take many steps before it is able to meet such a lofty goal, we may wonder if we ought to judge it to have the requisite capacity now. And if not, we may wonder if it is possible for humanity to have a collective duty at all.
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