How benefiting from permissible rights infringements grounds compensatory obligations

Lisa Hecht (Stockholm University)

Abstract: Sometimes it is permissible to harm an innocent person in order to save another or several others from even greater harm. Having neither waived nor lost her rights, the victim is wronged by the harm she is made to suffer. Her rights though not violated are permissibly infringed. Many would agree that this gives rise to a claim to compensation. But who should pay compensation? In this paper, I argue that beneficiaries of permissible rights infringements owe compensation to the victims. I further argue that this duty is best understood as a special duty of assistance. Just like anyone else in a position to assist, beneficiaries are under an obligation to assist the victim. This obligation is particularly stringent because victim and beneficiary stand in a special relationship created by the transferral of the benefit and by the morally tragic nature of their special relationship. As I will show, my proposal has advantages over two alternative explanations of beneficiaries’ compensatory obligations. I consider two rival explanations, the Origin Explanation and the Fairness Explanation. The Origin Explanation holds that because of the problematic origin of the benefit the beneficiary can come to owe compensation. The Fairness Explanation, suggested by Jeff McMahan, explains beneficiaries’ compensatory obligations by the fact that they are still better off paying compensation than they would have been had they not received the benefit. However, both explanations fail to satisfy the desideratum that I propose for any good explanation of beneficiaries’ compensatory obligations. We have to explain why beneficiaries owe compensation without questioning that the benefits of the permissible rights infringement lie where they ought to lie.