ABSTRACT
In ‘Distributing Responsibilities’, David Miller seeks to address what he calls ‘the problem of remedial responsibility/which he defines as follows: To be remedially responsible for a bad situation means to have a special obligation to put the bad situation right, in other words to be picked out, either individually or along with others, as having a responsibility towards the deprived or suffering party that is not shared equally among all agents. Moral agents can have obligations to compensate victims of injustice if they are benefiting and victims are suffering from the automatic effects of the act of injustice in question. Arguments relating to benefiting from injustice often consider the lasting effects of historic actions, committed some considerable time in the past. Calculations of advantage and disadvantage stemming from historic injustice will have to refer to complicated counterfactuals. The identification of the morally relevant counterfactual is only half the problem when it comes to making judgments as to advantage and disadvantage.
