Social beneficence

Abstract

A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. To frame my discussion, I argue, first, that justice does not in principle override beneficence, and second, that justice does not even typically outweigh beneficence, since, in institutional contexts, the stakes of beneficence are often extremely high. While defenders of the priority of justice have various responses available to them, a running theme is that no such response challenges the core methodological point that political philosophy should abandon its preoccupation with justice and begin to pay considerably more attention to social beneficence—that is, to beneficence understood as a virtue of social institutions.