The principle of beneficence in applied ethics

Abstract

Beneficent actions and motives occupy a central place in morality. Common examples are found in social welfare schemes, scholarships for needy and meritorious students, communal support of health-related research, policies to improve the welfare of animals, philanthropy, disaster relief, programs to benefit children and the incompetent, and preferential hiring and admission policies. What makes these diverse acts beneficent? Are beneficent acts obligatory or rather the pursuit of moral ideals? Such questions have generated a substantial literature on beneficence in both theoretical ethics and applied ethics. In theoretical ethics, the dominant issue in recent years has been how to place limits on the scope of beneficence. In applied ethics, a number of issues have been treated in the fields of biomedical ethics and business ethics.