Cui Bono? Advancing the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP)

Introduction 

In engaging this question, this essay posits and critically evaluates Butt’s connection-based account of benefitting from injustice and its imposition of normative remedial responsibilities on two levels. Firstly, this essay will theoretically evaluate the strongest version of Butt’s Modified Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP), outlining its argumentative parameters and critical objectives before engaging and responding to Parr’s (2016) critique and alternative “moral taintedness” account. Then, this essay will functionally evaluate Butt’s BPP, assessing its implications when applied to contemporary issues in political theory; engaging the cases of benefiting from colonialism and benefiting from pollution. Hence, this essay posits firstly that BPP is theoretically sound in grounding “backwards-looking remedial responsibilities” and secondly that BPP is functionally relevant in providing a “holistic account” when assessing “benefits and burdens within and between different communities” (Butt, 2013; Page, 2012; Butt, 2014). Thus, this essay argues that Butt’s account of benefiting from injustice represents a valid and invaluable means of directing discourse on issues in political theory.

Evaluating BPP in Theory 

Outlining Butt’s  BPP

Foremostly, the evaluation and advocacy of Butt’s BPP account of benefiting from injustice are contingent on understanding his critical objectives, argumentative parameters and potential contributions to political theory. Per Butt (2014), the ethical architecture of BPP intends to illustrate how moral agents being connected to “receipts of benefits stemming from injustice” can ground remedial obligations to lessen or rectify the effects of wrongdoing. To this end, BPP critically attempts to build upon our existing beliefs about justice and morality to “achieve reflective equilibrium”, grounding a prima facie case in line with our moral intuitions for moral agents to disgorge benefits from injustice and compensate other moral agents when the initial perpetrator of the wrongdoing is unable to do so (Butt, 2013).

The theoretical parameters of this argument are threefold. Firstly, Butt’s BPP is an advocate of rectificatory justice that arises when an “injustice creates a particularly offensive imbalance” between moral agents (Huseby, 2013). Secondly, this principle operates within the context of a nonideal backdrop of legitimacy rather than outlining moral duties or just distributions under ideal conditions (Pasternak, 2016). Finally, the BPP maintains an analytical focus on “agent-centred morality” and its intuitive aversion to taking advantage of injustice rather than appealing to overarching rules and institutions (Butt, 2014). 

This essay outlines four reasons for the appeal of applying Butt’s BPP to contemporary political issues. Firstly, an account of benefiting from injustice would identify the duty holder within pressing real‐world problems “without needing to assign any blame” (Karnein, 2017). Secondly, applying BPP generates intuitive results containing both a ‘forwards-looking’ element that targets existing and sustained future benefits and injustice alongside a ‘backwards-looking’ element which contextualises modern-day benefits and isolates benefits of injustice for redistribution. Per Page (2012),  this hybrid structure, makes sense of the common normative beliefs that bearing an appropriate share of the global burdens is a matter of rectificatory justice, ‘making amends’, rather than behaving beneficently. Thirdly, BPP encompasses intuitive desires of minimising unfairness, in international policy making. Per Couto (2017), although one might believe that attributing remedial duties to innocent beneficiaries is unfair, it might be worse to simply let victims bear the costs of historical injustice. Finally, the application of BPP allows analysis of complex situations in which benefits and harms are not material, and might not in any clear sense belong to the victim (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2021). This essay develops and presents Butt’s argument for BPP in two parts.

Foremostly, Butt (2007) posits a “river example” to illustrate how not disgorging the receipts of benefits from unjust acts is intuitively unjust. In this example, four self-sufficient individuals are trapped on an equally distributed fertile island sustained by an underground river. As the individuals are required to farm 200 units of plant X to survive and are rewarded harvests in direct correlation with their efforts, the diligence of A results in a harvest of 700 while B, C and D each harvest 200 units at T1. Here, Butt posits an unjust attempt to divert water from B&C by D which misfires and winds up benefiting B while leaving C and D destitute at T2. As A and B now have harvests of 700 and 600 respectively and D has left the island, we would intuitively believe that B has a moral obligation to compensate C for the injustice caused by D . In such cases,  As the primary duty bearer D is unable to discharge the duty of rectification towards C the moral reasons B has for acting is strong enough that they “should disgorge benefits up to the point whereby victims are no longer disadvantaged” (Butt, 2014). 

Secondly, Butt distils normative principles to explain the intuitions from the river example. Per Butt the crucial claim of his BPP is that injustice need not be an active act; it can consist of a passive refusal to give up benefits. Even when receipts of unjust benefits are non-voluntary, the decision not to give up the benefit is fully voluntary and represents an act of moral wrongdoing”  incompatible with individual moral agencies' “aversion to wrongdoing” and a subsequent commitment to reversing its effects. Within the river example, B’s benefit from D’s injustice results in rectificatory duties towards C as the victim because injustice occurred at T1 and inaction would sustain the injustice at T2. Per Anwander (2005) benefiting from injustice is then unjust as it “perpetuates injustice”, “enables injustice” and entails a moral agent “benefitting at others’ expense”. In two levels, Butt’s BPP account thus builds upon our moral intuitions and outlines how we make “a conceptual error” if we recognise a given act that has benefited us as unjust but is unwilling to reverse or mitigate its effects (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2021).

Criticisms of Butt’s BPP

A criticism of Butt’s BPP however comes from Parr, who in two parts raises an argument for an alternative “moral taintedness” account of benefiting from injustice. Firstly, Parr rejects the intuitive absurdity that results from the weak causal connection outlined within BPP as “arbitrary discrimination on victims whose injustice benefits others” (Couto, 2017). Through an unfairness objection, Parr (2016) asserts that if A were to benefit from an injustice done on X, but Y had also encountered similar injustice, their asymmetric entitlement to compensation from A would be intuitively unfair. In this view, the BPP betrays its critical objectives by failing our intuitive desire to equally prioritise both general “victims of injustice” as well as “those who have suffered the greatest harms.” when redistributing the fruits of injustice. Per Lindstad (2019) as the argument could be made that individual A in the river example also sustains injustice by not helping C at T2, the moral connections outlined between moral agents within Butt’s BPP fails to single out beneficiaries of injustice as uniquely morally obliged to help victims.

Secondly, Parr (2016) posits that an alternative “moral taintedness” account would better account for our intuitions when benefiting from injustice by focusing on the nature of the benefits themselves. Per Parr (2016), an alternative means of integrating our two convictions about “liabilities of beneficiaries” of injustice and the “distributive claims of victims” would be to hold a benefit as morally tainted when the recipient’s possession results from injustice.  The moral taintedness account thus states that the normative significance of not benefiting from injustice is that it represents a means through which moral agents might “frustrate immoral plans”. Per Lindstad (2019), this shifts the normative principle of benefiting from injustice away from the coherence of individual moral agents and argues that the underlying rationale here is that the completion of an immoral plan is impersonally bad, generating a reason for recipients to relinquish the “tainted” benefits.

Defending Butt’s BPP

However, this essay poses responses to the first part of Parr’s critique that defends the connection outlined within Butt’s BPP. Foremostly this essay asserts that Parr’s objection from unfairness is epistemologically flawed as it fails to adequately distinguish moral obligations on beneficiaries of injustice from the supererogatory moral obligations of bystanders. Here, this essay argues that asymmetric entitlements to rectification as outlined within the BPP are more intuitively motivated by a connection to a  “counterfactual world” wherein harm had not misappropriated the goods of victims (Butt, 2006). Per Couto (2017), Butt’s BPP recognises how beneficiaries of injustice have personal duties to rectify injustice, whereas innocent bystanders merely possess second-personal duties. In this view, as beneficiaries from injustice are capable of expressing regret and compensation that “permeates from the content of their own life” while bystander regret is detached and impersonal, Butt’s BPP is right to emphasise the unique “connection between victim and innocent beneficiary”, benefiting from injustice generates morally intuitive rectificatory duties (Couto, 2017; Parr, 2016).

In supporting this argument, this essay posits an example of the obligations owed by moral agents who come to possess Stolen Nazi Art. Here, although an individual moral agent has benefitted from the injustice of Nazi Germany, it seems absurd to argue that the rectification of injustice and disgorging of stolen Nazi Art should be equally divided amongst all victims of the Nazi Regime, even if there were victims whose arts were stolen on the same day but subsequently destroyed. As there remain asymmetric prima facie moral obligations that are determined by “the relation of an agent to a specific act of wrongdoing” (Parr, 2016), this essay argues that the intuitiveness of Butt’s (2014) modified BPP holds, moral agents are blameworthy when failing to disgorge benefits that they involuntarily receive as a result of injustice which harms other agents. 

Evaluating BPP in Practice

The application of Butt’s BPP in practice is then as a backwards-looking principle that attempts to combine historical contextualisation of remedial justice, the presence of on-going harms caused by historic wrongdoing, and the existence of moral agents who have benefited from the injustice to outline how some historical acts contribute or give rise to injustice and  “the way responsibility for rectifying injustice can be passed on” between moral agents and generations (Butt, 2013; Butt, 2006). Extending the moral coherence argument, applying Butt’s BPP builds upon real-world propositions involving: The nature of rectificatory duties, Nations and their collective responsibilities for democratic decision making and Nations and their overlapping generations. 

Here, benefiting from injustice involves two incidents of injustice. The first was committed at T1, with those responsible for it unavailable at T2; however, the second act of sustaining injustice is distinct and performed by current-day individuals. Per Butt (2013), insofar as a modern self-governing community fails to discharge its secondary duties of rectifying the unjust effects of its historical acts, it acts unjustly, “implicating new entrants into the political community in sustaining injustice”. Put simply, Butt’s BPP asks modern-day communities whether they are better off, and others are worse off, than they would be had all historic interactions been consensual, cooperative and just in character; arguing that situations where a community is advantaged at the expense of others, relative to this counterfactual are unjust and impose rectificatory obligations to maintain moral coherence (Butt, 2012). This essay will now evaluate the application of Butt’s BPP within the issues of climate justice and post-colonial responsibilities

Applying BPP: Climate Justice and Post-Colonialism

Outlining just distributions of burdens within a global climate response is contingent on normative principles. Today, as the global rise in temperature has disrupted the living conditions of modern societies through reduced health, safety and ecosystem services , Article 4.4 of the UNFCCC (1993),  affirms an approach in which  developed countries and other developed Parties should assist developing countries that are asymmetrically “vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to those adverse effects”. However, what makes the climate problem relevant from the perspective of justice is that this distribution of harm is all but unrelated to the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions that are responsible for worsening climate conditions (Mintz-Woo, 2021).

Application of Butt’s BPP  within climate justice then begins by identifying historic acts of uninhibited pollution as injustice, involving some sense of wrongdoing, culpability or negligence which is then perpetuated when those benefiting from this injustice today fail to repair the damage caused by their actions. Consequently, the BPP identifies beneficiaries of this injustice as modern generations within the developed world who “as a result of historic industrialisation” are so advantaged we would be justified in treating them as though they had voluntarily accepted “the benefits in question” (Butt, 2013). In this case of pollution, although the perpetrators of the original polluting act may no longer be around to provide rectification for their injustice, our intuitive affirmation that such actions give rise to compensatory obligations then recognises a failure to fulfil these duties itself constitutes an act of injustice. This consists of arguing that present-day generations have benefited from the polluting actions of their ancestors, and so possess special responsibility for addressing environmental problems as a result of the benefit they have received (Butt, 2013).

In 2001, the United Nations World Conference acknowledged and regretted the “massive human suffering” caused by colonialism. However, this conference was also marked by former colonial powers refusing to commit to making formal apologies or paying reparations. Per Butt (2013), the injustices done within colonialism were threefold. First, colonialism represented a form of domination which subjugated communities. Second, colonialism involved attempts to impose the colonial power’s culture and customs onto the colonised as a mechanism for establishing and consolidating political control. Finally, colonialism is deeply linked to the exploitation of colonized peoples such as the slave trade or the misappropriation of cultural property. As the harms and benefits from these injustices live on today, applying BPP would ground rectificatory duties of colonial injustice by assessing beneficiaries and victims within a subjunctive baseline which questions how the current state of colonial people deviates from a counterfactual “just, reciprocal and non-dominating political order” (Moore, 2013).

Criticism of BPP in Practise

However, a critique of the application of Butt’s BPP comes from Caney who raises a two-fold polemic against the functional limitations and epistemological precision of Butt’s account. Firstly, Caney (2006) argues that the intergenerational context of states within the would frustrate the critical objectives of the BPP of ensuring that “each of the beneficiaries pays for their benefits”, instead unfairly assigning duties to some of the beneficiaries to pay for everyone’s benefits. In this view, as the benefits of industrialization have been enjoyed by people no longer around, it stands to reason that it would be unfair to require current beneficiaries to pay for all of the benefits generated by the activities which involved historical injustice.  Per Couto (2017), this would represent a functionally undesirable position of imposing “liability without responsibility”.

Secondly, Caney (2006) posits that a Non-identity problem results in an epistemological inability to assign harms and benefits between moral agents when applied within intergenerational contexts. In this view, as benefits require agents to be demonstrably better off than they would otherwise be,  the notion that “children are born depending on when their parents mated” would result in a misfiring in allocating moral obligations towards historical injustice. Butt’s BPP is unable to ground rectification claims between connected moral agents intergenerationally as it cannot illustrate that they are “worse off than they would have been on the basis of “one phenomenon”(Caney, 2006). Per Garcia-Portela (2019), as the identity of currently living people depends upon the historic actions of previous generations, currently living people would not have come into existence without past injustices, they cannot adequately be assigned harms and benefits and Butt’s BPP fails to get off the ground.

Defending BPP in Practise

However, this essay poses responses to Caney’s criticism which defends and enriches an argument for the functionality of Butt’s BPP. Firstly, this essay posits that a “cooperative practice model” within an understanding of “overlapping” generations provides an argument for the intergenerational nature of collective injustice and benefits (Butt, 2006). By accommodating how injustices committed by A at T1 generates benefits for B and harms for C at T2, The BPP model accounts for the intuitive rectificatory duties owed by distinct but overlapping political institutions as aggregated moral agents. Per Garcia-Portela (2019), moral coherence dictates that individuals should pay for the inherited burdens of their collectives because they also inherit the benefits from the past actions of their societies.

Furthermore, this essay argues that Caney’s first criticism wrongfully tenders a Hobson’s choice such that “being a beneficiary of harm must generate duties either always or never”(Huseby, 2013). Referring once again to an example of stolen Nazi Art,  this essay highlights how the imposition of Caney’s position would negate the solid connection owed by current owners of such art as a result of benefiting from historical injustice, instead absurdly suggesting that the inability to fully assign duties to all previous owners of a specific piece of stolen Nazi Art would render duties of rectification or compensation from current owners unfair.

Consequently, by affirming an intuitive “collectivist view of responsibility and benefit” against the Non-Identity Problem, Butt’s BPP thus retains its functional value by highlighting how benefiting from injustice sustains injustice within the current global political context (Tan, 2008). Further support for this comes from recognising how the problem underlying the unequal distribution of undeserved harms and benefits of past injustices is a structural one. By affirming how inaction after benefiting from injustice is a repeated interaction between moral agents, this essay highlights how historical injustice has resulted in an asymmetric North-South world economy wherein modern beneficiaries actively sustain injustice. Support for this argument comes from works such as Rodney (2018) who asserts colonialism "drained African wealth and made it impossible for the continent to develop more rapidly". Per Butt (2013), Caney's Non-identity criticism “misunderstands the nature of the BPP’s counterfactual reasoning”. Applied within contemporary politics, a belief that enjoying certain benefits associated with the historical development of a collective is fair for any individuals that can or would inhabit the relevant political economy is what grounds the principle for moral agents to accept the burdens coming from that same development or risk the coherence of their intuitive moral beliefs (Garcia-Portela, 2019).

Conclusion

In conclusion, this essay has provided a linear evaluation of Butt’s account of benefiting from injustice. This essay has contextualised and provided a holistic understanding of BUtt’s theoretical framework, providing responses to relevant criticism and alternative frameworks. Furthermore, this essay has evaluated the functionality of Butt’s account by applying his BPP to issues within the global political economy, engaging unjust benefits from pollution and colonialism. Thus, although  questions of enforceability and calculations of harm and benefit warrant further analysis, this short essay argues that Butt’s BPP account of benefiting from injustice is theoretically valid, functionally relevant and plays an important role in contemporary political discourse.