The problematization of benefits

The notion of benefits is commonplace and influential in our everyday life. When we decide who to vote for in an election, we think in terms of who benefitted us or will benefit us, or society, the most. When we think of social justice issues or how to better our communities, we often think of what will benefit certain groups of people or if individuals with specific identities would be better-off with alternative policies in place.

This project arose from the identification of a gap in the existing literature with regard to the notion of a benefit transpiring. Firstly, I recognized that benefits are often taken to be the inverse of harm and this is not always the case. Secondly, whilst the notions of harming or being harmed are well defined in philosophical literature, and the moral implications frequently discussed, the same cannot be said for the notion of a benefit transpiring. Indeed, a benefit can be divorced from any ethical considerations pertaining to the act or agent.

This thesis aims to problematize the notion of a benefit transpiring with an eye to social justice progress. I begin by discussing numerous different conceptions one can have of value and what constitutes a good life. Ultimately, I conclude that the best approach to take in order to make sense of the problems presented throughout my project is a subjective relativist stance. That is to say, I hold that something can be good for me and not for you given certain facts about us. However, if one is unconvinced by subjectivism, very little of my project hinges on the acceptance of this doctrine and the issues raised still stand. Secondly, I present ordinary and unordinary uses of the term in order to decipher which common ways of understanding a benefit are misguided and why. Thirdly, I focus on interesting cases where it appears a benefit has transpired contrary to intuition. Finally, I move to discuss counterfactuals and baseline comparisons which are statements which hypothesize about the way the world would have been had certain aspects gone differently. I conclude that there are many potential problems these vehicles of analysis face, yet they can generally be overcome. In my final chapter, I provide a positive account for how one can use baselines to accelerate social justice progress. I focus on issues such as intersectionality and recognizing the importance of the questions we ask.

Ultimately, this project hopes to bring the importance of the problematization of benefits to the forefront of philosophical research by demonstrating how crucial it is for issues such as those pertaining to social justice to clarify the term we use so frequently.