The duty of beneficence in the Hebrew-Christian tradition is not the indiscriminate and unlimited maximizing of good imposed by utilitarianism. It is the duty to do what good one reasonably can, without omitting any perfect duty. The religious ideal of charity goes far beyond it. But beneficence and charity alike have to do only with those consequences of actions that are within human foresight. Nor is that all. Some portion of the evil in the world is a consequence of human wrongdoing and culpable folly; of that portion, at least some does not fall upon the blameless but returns to plague its inventors. Utilitarianism pays little attention to this. The task it lays upon the benevolent is to maximize good; and it will not relieve them of that task even if it may happen largely to consist in rescuing the idle, the headstrong, and the wicked from the ill consequences of their own conduct. [Bernard] Williams has denounced utilitarianism as an attack on human integrity, because it reduces each individual to “a channel between the input of everyone’s projects, including his own, and an output of optimific decision.” That is perhaps extreme. Nobody’s integrity is attacked by requiring him to defer his own projects in order to shield some innocent from violence or fraud. But at bottom it is an unanswerable criticism of the utilitarian concept of benevolence. Genuine benevolence, or willing the well-being of others, is willing that they live a decent human life, and so being prepared to help them in their efforts to do so; it is not an interminable bondage to alleviating the woes brought upon themselves by those who make little or no effort to live well.

(Alan Donagan, “Cases of Necessity,” chap. 4 in Absolutism and Its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Joram Graf Haber [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994], 41-62, at 61-2 [footnote omitted] [essay first published in 1977])

Note from KBJ: Notice the difference between beneficence and benevolence. The former is the doing of good; the latter is the disposition, will, or motivation to do good. One can have a duty of beneficence, but not of benevolence. Beneficence is to maleficence as benevolence is to malevolence. Christians say that God is not just benevolent, but omnibenevolent. Is there an omnimalevolent being? (Besides Paul Krugman, I mean.)