Beneficence by Convention

Abstract: Although the duty of beneficence is one of the core principles of bioethics, ethicists disagree widely about exactly what it requires of us. However, ethicists do agree about one important feature of beneficence: its status as a natural, rather than conventional, duty. That is, they typically agree that individuals' obligations of beneficence do not hold in virtue of the existence of any social convention. In this paper, I provide an outline of a conventionalist account of beneficence, and argue that it has a number of advantages over more familiar accounts of beneficence in bioethics.

According to the account of beneficence I propose, individuals have a strong interest in living in a community in which people help one another. And it is rational for individuals to do their part in creating this type of community only when they have assurance that others will do their part as well. Without some means of acquiring mutual assurance, individuals face a coordination problem in forming a beneficent community. Finally, coordination problems can be resolved only through the adoption of conventional norms. Put broadly, we have duties of beneficence because the conventional recognition of such duties enables us to live in community with one another.

This account has two primary bioethical upshots. First, it explains why the duty of beneficence sometimes requires us to maximize the good, and other times forms a Kantian "imperfect" duty. Second, it explains why distance sometimes makes a difference with respect to the stringency of the duty of beneficence.