Daniel Butt develops an account of corrective responsibilities borne by beneficiaries of injustice. He defends the consistency model. I criticize the vagueness in this model and present two interpretations of benefit from injustice (BFI) responsibilities: obligation and natural duty. The obligation model falls prey to the involuntariness objection. I defend a natural duties model, discussing how natural duties can be circumstantially perfected into directed duties and showing how the natural duties model avoids the involuntariness objection. I also address objections from structural injustice and demandingness.

The purpose of this essay is to increase the understanding of the discussion of political obligation. This concern the questions if, how, and to what extent people are required to obey state commands. More specifically the purpose is to increase the understanding of one of the topics main theories, the natural duty of justice. This account states that people have a natural duty to comply with just institutions that apply to them, independent of any voluntary actions.  For this a discourse surrounding the theory has been examined and evaluated. It consists of Rawls argument for the theory, a criticism formulated by Simmons, and a defence formulated by Waldron. Rawls argues that for a just society to be stable, the natural duty of justice is necessary, and also sufficient for basing political obligations. Simmons criticises this account for dispensing of voluntary actions that he sees as necessary for political obligation. Without these, the application of just institutions is morally insignificant. Waldron then defends the account by adding additional requirements for institutions to apply, besides justice. Institutions also have to be effective, in the sense that they are able to enact justice, and legitimate in the sense that they are preferable to other alternatives.  I will argue that justice of institutions is necessary but insufficient for them to apply to people. Voluntary actions like consent will also be argued to be unnecessary for institutions application to be morally significant. If institutions are not only just but also effective and legitimate, in the sense that they are the most just and effective in relation to the viable alternatives, then their application and commands has moral significance. The conclusion of this essay then is that the natural duty of justice can account for political obligations, given high demands for institutions to apply.

Compelling research in international relations and international political economy on global warming suggests that one part of any meaningful effort to radically reverse current trends of increasing green house gas (GHG) emissions is shared policies among states that generate costs for such emissions in many if not most of the world’s regions. Effectively employing such policies involves gaining much more extensive global commitments and developing much stronger compliance mechanism than those currently found in the Kyoto Protocol. In other words, global warming raises the prospect that we need a global form of political authority that could coordinate the actions of states in order to address this environmental threat. This in turn suggests that any serious effort to mitigate climate change will entail new limits on the sovereignty of states. In this book I focus on the normative question of whether or not we have clear moral reasons to bind ourselves together in such a supranational form of political association. I argue that one can employ familiar liberal arguments for the moral legitimacy of political order at the state level to show that we do have a duty to support such a global political project. Even if one adopts the premises employed by the most influential forms of liberal scepticism to the ideas of global political and distributive justice, such as those advanced by John Rawls and Thomas Nagel, it is clear that the threat of global warming has expanded the scope of justice. We now have a global and demanding duty of justice to create the political conditions that would allow us to collectively address our impact on the Earth’s atmosphere.