RT Article
T1 Harming the Beneficiaries of Humanitarian Intervention
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 21
IS 5
SP 1035
OP 1050
A1 Eggert, Linda
LA English
YR 2018
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1662929986
AB This paper challenges one line of argument which has been advanced to justify imposing risks of collateral harm on prospective beneficiaries of armed humanitarian interventions. This argument - the 'Beneficiary Principle' (BP) - holds that non-liable individuals' immunity to being harmed as a side effect of just armed humanitarian interventions may be diminished by their prospects of benefiting from the intervention. Against this, I defend the view that beneficiary status does not morally distinguish beneficiaries from other non-liable individuals in such a way as to permit exposing them to greater risks of being harmed. The argument proceeds in four steps. I first show that the BP can neither be grounded in liability-based nor in lesser-evil justifications for harming. I then argue that a standalone justification for unintended harming based on beneficiary status would face at least two critical challenges. The first concerns the BP's applicability to collectives; the second questions the normative weight we can plausibly ascribe to beneficiary status when beneficiaries are such by virtue of being victims of wrongful threats of harm. I argue that standing to benefit is morally irrelevant when the benefit consists in the mitigation or prevention of wrongful harms, and consequently suggest that the BP may only serve as a distributive principle in allocating risks of harm if it is disambiguated in a number of critical aspects and applied in a more narrowlydefined set of circumstances.
K1 Collateral harm
K1 Ex ante contractualism
K1 Humanitarian Intervention
K1 Immunity
K1 Lesser-evil justifications
K1 Liability
K1 Risk imposition
DO 10.1007/s10677-018-9944-0