The Principle of Beneficence in Applied Ethics (SEP)
Beneficent actions and motives have traditionally occupied a central place in morality. Common examples today are found in social welfare programs, 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 such beneficent acts and policies obligatory or merely the pursuit of optional moral ideals?
These 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 and professional ethics, a number of issues have been treated in the fields of biomedical ethics and business ethics.
1. The Concepts of Beneficence and Benevolence
The term beneficence connotes acts or personal qualities of mercy, kindness, generosity, and charity. It is suggestive of altruism, love, humanity, and promoting the good of others. In ordinary language, the notion is broad, but it is understood even more broadly in ethical theory to include effectively all norms, dispositions, and actions with the goal of benefiting or promoting the good of other persons. The language of a principle or rule of beneficence refers to a normative statement of a moral obligation to act for the others’ benefit, helping them to further their important and legitimate interests, often by preventing or removing possible harms. Many dimensions of applied ethics appear to incorporate such appeals to obligatory beneficence, even if only implicitly. For example, when apparel manufacturers are criticized for not having good labor practices in factories, the ultimate goal of the criticisms is usually to obtain better working conditions, wages, and other benefits for workers.
Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principle-beneficence/
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The principle of beneficence in applied ethics is the moral requirement to act for the benefit of others. It obliges agents not merely to refrain from causing harm, but to take positive steps to promote the well-being, interests, and welfare of individuals or groups.
In bioethics, beneficence is typically paired with nonmaleficence. Nonmaleficence requires that we do not cause harm; beneficence goes further and requires that we actively contribute to good outcomes. This can include preventing harm, removing harm, and promoting good. For example, a physician should not only avoid injuring a patient but should also provide treatments that improve the patient’s health.
Beneficence can be understood in different strengths. A weak version requires helping others when the cost or risk to oneself is minimal. A strong version demands significant sacrifice if doing so would greatly benefit others. Most applied ethical frameworks adopt a moderate position, recognizing limits based on feasibility, fairness, and competing obligations.
In professional contexts—medicine, research, social work, public policy—the principle often functions as a guiding norm. Decisions should be evaluated in terms of expected benefits, balanced against risks and burdens. This leads to practical questions: Who benefits? What counts as a benefit? How certain are the outcomes? How are benefits and risks distributed?
Beneficence is also central in utilitarian ethics, where promoting overall well-being is the core moral aim. However, even non-utilitarian theories incorporate it in constrained form, limiting it by respect for autonomy, justice, or rights.
In applied ethics, then, beneficence is not vague kindness. It is a structured obligation to promote welfare, interpreted within institutional roles, moral limits, and practical constraints.
Wikpedia
Beneficence in general means “active well-doing”. Duties of beneficence form a part of various religious and secular ethical theories. As an applied ethical concept relating to research, beneficence means that researchers should have the welfare of the research participant as a goal of any clinical trial or other research study. The antonym of this term, maleficence, describes a practice that opposes the welfare of any research participant. According to the Belmont Report, researchers are required to follow two moral requirements in line with the principle of beneficence: do not harm, and maximize possible benefits for research while minimizing any potential harm on others.
The idea that medical professionals and researchers would always practice beneficence seems natural to most patients and research participants, but in fact, every health intervention or research intervention has potential to harm the recipient. There are many different precedents in medicine and research for conducting a cost–benefit analysis and judging whether a certain action would be a sufficient practice of beneficence, and the extent to which treatments are acceptable or unacceptable is under debate.
Despite differences in opinion, there are many concepts on which there is wide agreement. One is that there should be community consensus when determining best practices for dealing with ethical problems.
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