Abstract

According to the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), following an injustice that has produced damages, agents that have received benefits from it may incur a duty to redress the victim even if they are not at fault for it. In this paper, I do not offer either a full-blown defense or a refutation of the principle. Instead, I take issue with the common view, accepted by both sympathetic and critical authors, according to which the BPP is a matter of corrective justice. In the end, I am going to argue that the sole way of defending the BPP is as a principle of distributive justice. Far from a merely semantic dispute, the issue of whether the BPP is corrective or distributive is going to lead to significant normative implications regarding the sense in which we can meaningfully say that beneficiaries owe it to victims to redress the unfairness existing between them.