Doing vs. Allowing Harm (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeDoing vs. Allowing HarmFirst published Tue May 14, 2002; substantive revision Fri Sep 21, 2007Is doing harm worse than allowing harm? If not, there should be nomoral objection to active euthanasia in circumstances where passiveeuthanasia is permissible; and there should be no objection to bombinginnocent civilians where doing so will minimize the overall number ofdeaths in war. There should, however, be an objection—indeed, anoutcry—at our failure to prevent the deaths of millions ofchildren in the third world from malnutrition, dehydration, andmeasles.[1]Moreover, it seems that the question is pertinent to the question of whether consequentialism is true, as consequentialists believe that doing harm is no worse than allowing harm while anti-consequentialists, almost universally, disagree. But is doing harm worse than allowing harm?We might divide approaches to this question into two broad kinds: thosethat attempt to answer it using examples without saying anything aboutthe nature of the distinction. (Following Shelly Kagan, I'll call thisapproach ‘the contrast strategy.’) And those that analyzethe distinction in depth and try to show that its underlying naturedictates an answer to the moral question.1. The Contrast Strategy2. Distinguishing Distinctions3. Causing and Not Causing Not to Occur4. Counterfactual Accounts5. Action, Inaction and Positive and Negative Rights6. The ‘Most of the Things He Could have Done’ Account7. The Transfer of Energy Account8. More on ‘Safety Net’ Cases9. ConclusionBibliography Cited Works Further Reading Other Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. The Contrast StrategyJames Rachels provides a classic example of the firstapproach.[2] He offers us a pair of cases—in one,Smith drowns his young cousin in the bathtub; in the other, Jones plansto drown his young cousin, but finds the boy already unconscious underwater and refrains from saving him. The two cases are exactly alikeexcept that the first is a killing and the second a letting die.Rachels invites us to agree that Smith's behavior is no worse thanJones's. He then concludes that killing per se is no worse than lettingdie per se, and that if typical killings are worse than typicallettings die that must be because of other factors.Although Rachels seems correct about Smith and Jones, the inferencefrom these cases to the moral equivalence of killing and letting die ingeneral (where other things are equal) has been challenged. ShellyKagan argues that it assumes that “if a factor has genuine moralrelevance, then for any pair of cases, where the given factor varieswhile others are held constant, the cases in that pair will differ inmoral status.”[3] He claims, moreover, that thisassumes the Additive Assumption, the view that “the status of theact is the net balance or sum which is the result of adding up theseparate positive and negative effects of the individualfactors.”[4] He raises several objections to the AdditiveAssumption. Firstly, one might describe a pair of cases that areexactly alike except that one is a killing and the other a letting die,where the first intuitively seems far worse than the second. If thispair of cases is as good as Rachels' pair, then either the inference isvalid in both cases—to prove the contradiction that killing isboth worse and not worse than letting die—or it is invalid inboth cases. Secondly, one might raise the rhetorical question: whyaddition—rather than, say, multiplication or some otherfunction?Instead of using the contrast strategy, let's try to figure out thenature of the distinction between killing and letting die and, moregenerally, between doing and allowing harm. In both doing and allowing,an agent is responsible for or relevant to a bad upshot—such as adeath or injury—in the sense that she could have prevented it.The contrast is most naturally picked out by the terms‘doing’ and ‘allowing’, or ‘making’and ‘allowing’, but since these have vagaries andawkwardnesses in practice, I shall use the terms “positivelyrelevant to an upshot” and “negatively relevant to anupshot” for cases of “doing” and“allowing”, respectively.[5]2. Distinguishing DistinctionsSuppose some upshot occurs and would not have occurred if the agenthad behaved in some different way. The question of whether the agent ispositively or negatively relevant to the upshot is often conflated withor distorted by questions that should be kept distinct from it, likethe questions of (i) whether the agent intended the upshot, (ii)whether she could easily have prevented the upshot, (iii) whether sheguaranteed the upshot or merely made it probable, and even (iv) whetherthe agent's behavior was morally objectionable. It can easily be seenthat these do not coincide with the distinction between doing andallowing.(i) Consider the distinction between cases where an agent intendsthe upshot and cases where she does not. If you drive your car intosomeone's body and she dies as a result, you undoubtedly killed her,even if you did not intend her death. Conversely, someone mayintentionally allow a child to drown in order to inherit hisfortune.(ii) It tends to be easier to avoid killing than to avoid lettingdie, but this is only a tendency. Sometimes saving is easier than notkilling. It is easy to throw a life preserver, and it may be difficultto refrain from killing someone who is threatening one or who hastreated one appallingly. There are even cases where it is physicallydifficult to avoid killing; as for example, where one has tohold tight to a tree to prevent one's (light) vehicle whose brakes havefailed from running into a pedestrian.(iii) Sometimes the terms ‘making’ and‘allowing’ are used to suggest the difference betweenmaking certain and making possible or probable. For example, indiscussions of the problem of evil, people sometimes say, “Well,God didn't actually make the murder occur. He just allowed it tooccur.” This is best understood, I believe, as a distinctionbetween raising the probability of murder to 1 from something less than1, on the one hand, and raising the probability of murder from 0 tosomething higher but still less than 1. This is a morally significantdistinction but it is not the distinction between doing and allowing.An agent can kill without guaranteeing death. For example, by addingsmall quantities of poison to her victim's meals she may bring aboutthe death, even though there was a 20% chance that the poison would notkill her. On the other hand, an agent might guarantee the demise of aplant by failing to water it in a situation where she is the only onewho can do so.(iv) Finally, the distinction between doing and allowing harm issometimes thought to have, as part of its conceptual content, a moralelement. This thought is rarely made explicit, but the way people areinclined to classify cases suggests that they are guided by it. Thereare two main difficulties with this way of drawing the line. Firstly,if it is true by definition that killing is worse than letting die,then the question of whether killing is worse than letting die issettled in a trivial, circular, uninteresting way. Secondly, there areobvious counterexamples to this crude account—morally appallingcases of letting die—failing to feed one's children—andmorally acceptable cases of killing. We have no hesitation talkingof killing in self-defense. Let's turn to some more plausiblecandidates. In what follows I discuss a series of accounts of thedistinction, and where appropriate, the moral significance orinsignificance of each account.3. Causing and Not Causing Not to OccurOne natural suggestion is that the agent who is positively relevantto the upshot causes it to occur; whereas the agent who is negativelyrelevant to the upshot doesn't cause it, but simply fails to prevent itwhere she could have done so.[6] This suggestion has immediate moral implications. It seems true bydefinition (almost) that you can be causally responsible only forupshots that you cause. And it is arguably true that you can bemorally responsible only for what you are causally responsiblefor. So, if you cause a bad state of affairs, you've probably donewrong; whereas if you don't cause a bad state of affairs, youhaven't. In choosing between killing and letting die, you are choosingbetween doing wrong and not doing wrong. (Of course, this doesn'tapply to non-harmful cases of killing, such as, arguably, some casesof active euthanasia.) The question of what you ought to do is thentautologously easy.This argument begins to get into trouble when we reflect on the factthat we are often responsible for upshots we allow: the death of thehouseplants or the child's illiteracy. When we notice that, in thesecases, the plants die or the child remains uneducated because of somefailure on the agent's part, it becomes clear that the agent does, insome sense, cause the upshots. Moreover, most widely acceptedcontemporary accounts of causation imply that some event or factinvolving these agents causes the deaths or illiteracy. For example,the counterfactual account of causation—according to which (veryroughly) event E causes F if and only if hadE not occurred F would not have occurredeither—implies that it was the agent's failure to water theplants that caused the deaths.[7] John Mackie's INUS condition—accordingto which E causes F if and only if E is a(ninsufficient but) necessary part of a(n unnecessary but)sufficientcondition for F—implies that the fact that the agentfailed to water the plants causes the plants to die.[8]4. Counterfactual AccountsWe are concerned then with a contrast between two ways the behaviorof agents causes upshots. One suggestion is to say that when the agentis positively relevant to the upshot, the upshot would not haveoccurred if she had been absent from the scene.[9] Suppose, for example,the victim dies because I push his head under water. He wouldn't havedied if I had been absent. On the other hand, suppose he is in deepwater and cannot swim and I don't save him. He would have drownedanyway if I had been absent. In these two cases, the counterfactualaccount draws the line in the intuitively correct way.This account is sometimes used to support the claim that doing harmis worse than allowing harm, on the grounds that, on this account,allowing harm is simply a matter of letting nature take its course,which, other things being equal, is good, or at least permissible.There are two or three quick objections to this argument. Firstly, itassumes that acting (such as killing or saving lives) is a matter ofinterfering with the course of nature—in other words, that humanaction is somehow outside of the course of nature. This is extremelycontroversial. Secondly, even if human action is outside the course ofnature, if the agent is faced with a choice between killing one andallowing two to die at the hand of some other agent, this argumentwould favor neither option since neither involves letting nature takeits course. But, as traditionally understood and used, the Doctrine ofDoing and Allowing is supposed to favor letting die in this case justas much as in others. Thirdly, interfering in the course of nature issometimes obviously the better course of action—to stop thebleeding, restart the heart, and so on.A different way the counterfactual account can be used to supportthe claim that doing harm is worse than allowing harm is this: ifsomething bad happens when you are not present (or, especially, if youhad never existed) then you aren't responsible for it. If we turn ourattention to another world where you are present, but which isotherwise exactly like the first, it seems that your presence makes nodifference empirically and, hence, should make no difference morally.This superficially compelling argument seems to prove toomuch—politicians' careers have hung on the question of whetherthey were in the room at the time the conspiracy was being hatched.Moreover, suppose an SS officer, Franz, tortures someone to death. Butthis is standard practice in the Gestapo. If Franz had stayed home witha sore throat, or if Franz had never existed, his pal Hans would havedone the torturing, in the same way, at the same time Franz did. If thecounterfactual account is correct, then Franz is negatively relevant tothe victim's death by torture. That is, Franz merely allowed the deathto occur. This case also creates problems for the idea that killing isworse than letting die, since the fact that Hans was waiting in thewings in no way diminishes Franz's wrongdoing in this case.[10] So, thisway of drawing the distinction is problematic, and this argument forthe moral significance of the distinction is flawed.Alan Donagan suggests a similar account of the distinction.[11] Todetermine whether the agent is positively or negatively relevant to anupshot, we should consider what would have happened if the agent hadnot acted at the relevant moment, or what would have happened if theagent had ‘abstained from intervening in the course ofnature’. It isn't entirely clear what we are supposed to imaginewhen we imagine this but perhaps it's that the agent is asleep or in atrance or in some other way not exercising her agency. Now—withrespect to some behavior that led to some upshot, we might ask: wouldthat upshot have occurred if the agent had abstained from interveningin the course of nature? If it would have, the agent allowed theupshot. If it would not have, then she did it (her relevance to theupshot is positive).The Hans/Franz example can be revised to work against Donagan'sversion, but here's an additional counterexample. Suppose a man islying asleep on the ground. He is awoken by a crash and notices a largerock rolling down the hill towards him. He can easily move out of itsway, but realizes that if he does so the rock will gain momentum andkill a group of small deaf children further down the hill. He tenseshis muscles, fights his desire to run away and stands his ground. Therock hits and seriously injures him. But he stops it. And he saves thechildren. Donagan's account, however, seems to imply that he merelyallows the rock to stop, since, had he remained asleep, the rock wouldhave struck and been stopped by his body.[12]5. Action, Inaction and Positive and Negative RightsWarren Quinn offers an account of the distinction—guided headmits by the conviction that doing harm is worse than allowingharm[13] —according to which an agent ispositively relevant to a harmful upshot when his most directcontribution to the harm is an action, whether his own or that of someobject.[14] His relevance is negative when his mostdirect contribution is an inaction, a failure to prevent the harm. Anagent's most direct contribution to a harmful upshot of his agency isthe contribution that most directly explains the harm. And onecontribution explains harm more directly than another if theexplanatory value of the second is exhausted in the way it explains thefirst.The key difference here is between cases where the agent producesthe result by an action and cases where she produces it by aninaction—pushing the head under water or refraining from throwinga life preserver. There's an extra complication here, however.Sometimes, Quinn says, your relevance to a death can be positive, youcan kill, in other words, even though you don't act. This happens, forexample, when you are on a train headed towards some drowning victimsyou wish to save when you notice someone tied to the tracks ahead ofyou. You can stop the train but you choose not to in order to reachyour destination. Quinn believes that you kill in this case, becausethe train acts as your agent, taking you where you want to go, andcrushing the person tied to the tracks in the process. On the otherhand, if you had chosen not to stop the train for some other reason butyou would have not minded had someone else stopped the train, then yourfailure to stop the train would not have constituted a killing.What are the moral implications of this way of drawing the line?Following Philippa Foot, Quinn believes that the key here is thedistinction between negative and positive rights.[15] Positive relevance toharm involves the violation of negative rights; negative relevance toharm involves the violation of positive rights. Since negative rightsare more stringent than positive rights, it is worse to be positivelyrelevant to harm than to be negatively relevant to harm (ceterisparibus). But why should we think negative rights more stringent.Here's Quinn:[i]n such a morality [neutral vis á vis killing andletting die] the person trapped on the road has a moral say aboutwhether his body may be destroyed only if what he stands to lose isgreater than what others stand to gain. But then surely he has no realsay at all. For, in cases where his loss would be greater than the gainto others, the fact that he could not be killed would be sufficientlyexplained not by his authority in the matter but simply by the balanceof overall costs. And if this is how it is in general—if we mayrightly injure or kill him whenever others stand to gain more than hestands to lose—then surely his body (one might say his person) isnot in any interesting moral sense his. It seems rather to belong tothe human community, to be dealt with according to its best overallinterest…. Whether we are speaking of ownership or morefundamental forms of possession, something is, morally speaking, hisonly if his say over what may be done to it (and thereby to him) canoverride the greater needs of others.[16]To say that one has a negative right against being harmed is to saythat it is (at least, prima facie) wrong to harm one unless one wishesto be harmed. It is crucial that we add the phrase “unless onewishes to be harmed”, since without it, the precedence ofnegative rights wouldn't give the victim any special say about his ownbody, because it would be just as wrong to harm him even if he asked tobe harmed, and it would be wrong for him to harm himself. So, thecrucial thing is that the victim has some sort of a say about whathappens to himself(i.e., others are morally bound to respect his wisheswith respect to his body to a certain extent). Quinn's claim is that ifthere is no extent to which someone's wishes with respect to his body,etc. are to be respected, then we've completely done away with the ideaof ownership of one's body, etc.One person's wishes about what happens to her body do often clashwith someone else's wishes about what happen to his. For example, Susanwishes to marry Paul, but Paul doesn't wish to marry Susan. Moralityobviously cannot give all such wishes precedence. So, the suggestiongoes, let's give some subset of them precedence. For example, let'sgive negative wishes precedence. Why, what's so special about negativewishes? “Well, nothing,” the answer seems to go. “Butunless we give some wishes precedence, there will be no domain in whichthe victim's personal preference takes precedence; and in that case,there will be no sense in which the agent is lord in that domain. Inother words, without some such precedence there will be no ownership ofone's body or mind, etc.” Quinn argues that we cannot givepositive rights precedence over negative rights withoutincoherence.[17] And, hence, he concludes that we must givenegative rights precedence over positive rights.But there are other ways to divide up rights than the division intopositive and negative rights. We might divide them into the rights ofchildren and the rights of adults, rights concerning the upper half ofthe body and rights concerning the lower half, etc. and then giveprecedence to one set over the other whenever they come into conflict.These seem arbitrary and wasteful, but their rationale seems no worsethan Quinn's.Quinn's is a funny sort of defense of negative rights. Unless I'mmissing something, it doesn't pick out any special feature of negativerights that makes them specially worth respecting.6. The ‘Most of the Things He Could have Done’ AccountLike Quinn, Jonathan Bennett thinks that the fundamental distinctionbetween doing and allowing is between cases where the upshot occursbecause of one's action and cases where the upshot occurs because ofone's inaction—although he prefers to replace“action/inaction” talk with “positive/negativefact” talk.[18] When Bennett discusses the contrast betweenpositive and negative relevance to harm, he is attempting to capture adeep, philosophically interesting distinction that underlies our talkof ‘doing and allowing’ ‘making andletting’,‘killing and letting die’. He acknowledgesthat the correspondence between his distinction and the distinctions wemake in everyday life and language may be inexact. He says that mybehavior is negatively relevant to an upshot if a negative fact aboutmy behavior is the least informative fact that suffices to complete acausal explanation of it; whereas my behavior is positively relevant tothat upshot if a positive fact about my behavior is the leastinformative fact about my conduct that suffices to complete a causalexplanation of it. For example, if I jog while you drown, your drowningcould be explained by the fact that I jogged, but it could also beexplained by the less informative fact that I did not pull you out of the water.In a nutshell, on Bennett's view, an agent's relevance to an upshotis positive if most of the ways she could have behaved at the timewould not have led to the upshot; otherwise, it is negative.[19] Forexample, suppose I douse a slug with salt and it dies as a result. Myrelevance to its demise is positive, since most of the ways I couldhave behaved would not have led to the death. On the other hand, if itdies because I fail to move it from the path of a car, then most of theways I could have behaved at the time would have led to its death, somy relevance to the death is negative.On this account, doing harm is no worse than allowing harm. If someupshot obtains because of the way you behaved, then the fact that therewere many ways (rather than only a few) you could have behaved whichwould also have had that result is morally insignificant. Thisconclusion is surprising, even shocking. Bennett's account, however,can explain why we tend to think of killing as worse than letting die.He claims, quite plausibly, that it is morally worse to be causallyrelevant to a bad upshot one could easily have avoided than a similarlybad upshot one could have avoided only with great difficulty. If mostof the ways one could have behaved would have led to an upshot, then itwas probably somewhat difficult or onerous to avoid the upshot; whereasif most of the ways one could have behaved would not have led to anupshot, then it was probably fairly easy to avoid the upshot. Thiscorrelation is not inevitable, however. It is easy to call 911, and canbe difficult to refrain from killing a child at the bottom of a well ifyour only alternative is to continue hanging from a rope above her.In spite of its virtues, Bennett's account faces some formidabledifficulties. It has often been attacked with counterexamples like thefollowing:Raccoon: Returning to the campsite after fetching water, Inotice a raccoon eating my food. Hiding behind some trees downwind ofhim, I know that if I make a noise he will run away. I notice a largebell near me, but decide against using it, allowing the raccoon to eatmy food.Bennett's account, of course, says just that. But let's change thestory slightly. Suppose now that I am closely surrounded by bells. If Imove at all, I will make a sound loud enough to scare off the raccoon.Again, I don't move and he eats on undisturbed. It seems that I stillallow the food to be eaten. The addition of more bells doesn't changethis.Some philosophers argue that such examples refute Bennett'saccount.[20] Their diagnosis of the difficulty goeslike this: “What's important here is that the agent is immobilethroughout. Immobility is incompatible with positive relevance to anupshot. Nifty slogan: ‘You cannot do anything by doingnothing.’ Bennett's account wrongly implies that immobility iscompatible with positive relevance to an upshot.”But immobility is not necessarily incompatible with positiverelevance to an upshot. Consider the case I described earlier of theagent who was positively relevant to the rock's stopping and thechildren's being unscathed by standing his ground, precisely by notmoving. Here's another case. After a mild earthquake the agent findsherself lying on and crushing a tube connected to a life support machine that is keeping someone alive. Unless the agent moves soon, the victim will die from lack of oxygen. She stays put. The victim dies. It is notimplausible to say that the agent killed the victim, although she wascompletely immobile throughout the relevant time period.[21] Thesecases make it clear that immobility doesn't rule out positiverelevance. But if it is not my immobility that explains the fact that Iam negatively relevant to the raccoon's consuming my food, what isit?Before answering this question, let's consider another difficultcase for Bennett's account, Sassan: An assassin, A. Sassan, ispreparing to assassinate Victor by shooting him. A second assassin,Baxter, is waiting across the street watching Sassan to ensure hissuccess. If Sassan shows any signs of hesitation, Baxter will shootVictor himself. Suppose Sassan knows about Baxter and his intentionsand also knows that he can turn his gun on Baxter instead of on Victorif he so chooses. Although this thought crosses his mind, he quicklysuppresses it, since he is committed to Victor's annihilation. Heshoots Victor and Victor dies instantly. Most of the ways he could havebehaved would have led to the shooting and death of Victor (either byhimself or by Baxter). By Bennett's account, Sassan's relevance to thefact that Victor is shot and killed is negative. This means that Sassandoesn't kill Victor, but merely lets him die. Hold on! I just said thatSassan shot Victor. He pulled the trigger. The gun fired. A bullet flewout of the barrel and entered Victor's body. Victor died from thebullet wound. A clearer case of killing is impossible to find. Bennettmight repeat the point that positive relevance to a death is notexactly the same as killing. Nevertheless, insofar as we have anypre-theoretical grip on (and interest in) the concept of positiverelevance to a death, Sassan's relevance to Victor's death must strikeus as positive rather than negative.[22] And yet Bennett'saccount implies that it is negative.Someone sympathetic with Bennett's account may attempt todemonstrate that that account does accommodate our intuitions on thisscore by claiming that it implies that Sassan's behavior is positivelyrelevant to the actual death that Victor died, since if Baxter hadkilled him, he would have died a different death. This response is notconsistent with Bennett's approach, however, since it the phrases‘the actual death’ and ‘a different death’ seemto be referring to events rather than facts. And Bennett is clearlyconcerned with relevance to facts not events.Bennett himself has pointed out that the upshot that concerns us isnot the fact that Victor died (no-one could prevent that) but the factthat Victor died at T (or perhaps, the fact that Victor diedno later than T).[23] He suggested that perhaps Sassan ispositively relevant to that, since most of the ways he could havebehaved would have resulted in Victor's dying later than T.But we could, with minimal artifice, ensure that Baxter is disposed tokill Victor at exactly T if Sassan does not. For example, wecould imagine that there is only a fraction of a second when Victor isvulnerable to a bullet and that Baxter is located closer to him (or hasa faster acting gun) so that there is a moment T2such that if Sassan does not shoot at T2, he willnot succeed in killing Victor, but such that Baxter still has a chanceto get a shot off at T1 with the result that Victorwill die at T.Perhaps someone may try to argue that Sassan is positively relevantto something—the fact that Victor is killed with this bulletrather than that, or more simply the fact that Victor is killed by himrather than by Baxter. The latter suggestion will not do, since it begsthe question. Bennett cannot assume that his account implies thatSassan kills Victor, since that is the very claim at issue. As to thesuggestion that Sassan is positively relevant to Victor's being killedwith this bullet rather than that, surely we could modify the story insuch a way that if Sassan does not pull the trigger, Baxter can push aswitch that will guarantee that the gun fires.So it seems that Bennett is committed to the claim that Sassan isnegatively relevant to (the various salient facts concerning) Victor'sdeath, and hence, that Sassan let Victor die. This seems wrong.7. The Transfer of Energy AccountWhy do we think of Sassan's relevance to Victor's death as positive?Surely because Sassan ‘acts on’ him in a way that one doesnot ‘act on’ a drowning victim if one simply stands by andwatches him drown. Similarly, the woman who deprived the victim ofoxygen by lying on the oxygen tube (while remaining immobile) acted onthe victim to cause his death. By contrast, in Raccoon, my role in theevent of the raccoon's consuming my food was precisely not to act onthe raccoon. In cases of ‘acting on’, it seems, physicalforces run from the agent to the affected object or patient. Thisseems to distinguish typical cases of doing from typical cases ofallowing harm.Let's clarify the account. Obviously the agent need not act on thepatient directly—it is enough that physical forces run from oneto the other, however indirectly. Moreover, it cannot be sufficient forpositive relevance to an upshot that physical forces run from the agentto the victim or patient at the appropriate time. The agent may haveacted on the patient but done so to produce some other effect. Forexample, instead of drowning him or pulling him out, she throws him arose. A passenger on a runaway trolley doesn't seem to kill the victimof that trolley in spite of the fact that his weight adds to themomentum of the trolley and, hence, there is a transfer of energybetween the two. We should add that the way in which she acts on himmust explain the upshot. In the case just described, because herthrowing him a rose doesn't explain his death by drowning, she doesn'tcount as positively relevant to his death.[24]A puzzle remains. What about cases where the agent removes a safetynet from beneath a falling victim, unplugs a respirator, kicks a rockout of the path of the runaway vehicle, and other similar cases? Nophysical forces run from the agent to the victim. So, by the accountunder discussion, they are cases of negative relevance, and yet many ofthem, at least by many people, are confidently judged to be cases ofpositive relevance. Of course, such cases are by their naturetroublesome and controversial. Unlike Sassan and Raccoon, these may becases of “spoils to the victor”—cases we shouldclassify in whatever way the otherwise best theory does.[25] The“acting on” account could fairly easily be adapted so thatit treated such “safety net” cases as cases of positiverelevance. Instead of insisting on one or another version of thataccount, let me outline three versions of it.According to the first, safety net cases are cases of negativerelevance because, although the agent acts on the net, the net does notact on the victim.According to the second, they are cases of positive relevancebecause the agent acts on the net (physical forces run from the agentto the net) and the position of the net is a necessary part of thecausal explanation of the victim's death. More generally: The agent ispositively relevant to an upshot U if the agent acts onX to produce feature F in X and Xshaving F is a necessary part of the causal story leading to U.[26]According to the third version, it is not a clear case of positiverelevance because although she acts on the net, the net does not act onthe victim, but nor is it a clear case of negative relevance, becausethe relevance of her behavior to the upshot is not in terms of herfailure to act on something. It is a borderline case.I submit that this distinction between cases where the agent acts onthe victim and cases where she does not is at least one strand in thecomplex tangle underlying our commonsense distinction between doing andallowing. If that is right, what are the moral implications? Not clear,I think, but this distinction does help explain our tendency to be moreupset when we kill than when we let die. When physical forces run fromthe agent to the victim (even where the agent is uncontroversiallyinnocent) there tends to be something like a jolt—as oneexperiences the death of which one is a causal factor. Consider a casewhere the victim jumps or is thrown in front of the agent's car.Although there is no question of the agent's guilt in this case, theevent must feel more distressing to her than would a case where she isaware of a death that she cannot prevent.[27]8. More on ‘Safety Net’ CasesJeff McMahan puts “safety net cases” front and center ofhis own account of the distinction, arguing that some of them qualifyas killings and some as lettings die.[28] A number of factorsdistinguish the killings from the lettings die. “Among these arewhether the person who terminates the aid or protection is the personwho has provided it, whether the aid or protection is self-sustainingor requires more of the agent, and whether the aid or protection isoperative or as yet inoperative.”[29] Here are three caseshe discusses:(Burning Building 1): A person trapped atop a high burning buildingleaps off. Seeing this, a firefighter quickly stations a self-standingnet underneath. But he then immediately notices that two other personshave jumped from a window several yards away. He therefore repositionsthe net so that it catches the two. The first jumper then hits theground and dies.(Burning Building 2): Just like (Burning Building 1) except that itis a second firefighter who repositions the net.(Burning Building 3): Just like (Burning Building 2) except thatthe second firefighter moves the safety net out of a malicious desireto kill.Convinced that (Burning Building 2) is importantly like (BurningBuilding 1), McMahan points out that sometimes one agent can act onbehalf of another, or they can act as a team (e.g., of firefighters) sothat whether it is the first or the second firefighter doesn't matter,since they are acting in a capacity that is “role-based”.In (Burning Building 3), however, where the second firefighter ismotivated by malice against the victim, he is acting on his own andkills the victim.The messy, somewhat ad hoc nature of McMahan's way of drawing theline is clearly a strike against it, as is the fact that it is clearlymotivated by a desire to accommodate the moral intuition that killingis worse than letting die. If, however, some or all of the factors thatMcMahan lists as affecting the question of whether a case is one ofkilling or letting die can be seen to follow from some simpler, deeperaccount of the distinction, so much the better for that account and forMcMahan's judgments about cases. Here's a way this might be done. It issomewhat arbitrary how we count actions—whether my typing theword ‘word’ involves four actions or just one, for example.Similarly, it is arbitrary whether the behavior of first writing a(potentially life-saving) check and then tearing it up count as asingle action or as two. The simple action of tearing it up might beclassified as a killing, whereas the complex ‘act’ ofwriting it and tearing it up might seem equivalent to the non-act ofnever writing it, and, hence, count as letting die. In asking whetherthe agent killed or let die in such a case, we may sometimes focus onthe second (simple) act and sometimes on the complex act. Whether thetwo are performed by the same person, the time between the two, whetherthe first was self-sustaining, etc. all affect our choice here. Itseems that Bennett's or the counterfactual account may, with minimalartifice, be modified so that most of the cases that McMahan wants toclassify as lettings die are so classified. For example, we mightconsider what would have happened if the agent had not been present(during the entire period—including the time of writing the checkand the time of tearing it up.) or we might consider whether most ofthe ways the agent could have behaved throughout the entire periodwould have had the result that upshot obtained.McMahan's suggestion that the firefighter kills if he acts with amalicious intention, whereas he lets die if he acts with a goodintention seems wrong, however. Whatever else we think about doing andallowing, we should be able to distinguish them without reference tointernal mental states of the agent.9. ConclusionThis discussion suggests, I think, that “the distinctionbetween doing and allowing” does not refer uniquely. More likely, itrefers indefinitely to a tissue of largely overlappingdistinctions—such as Bennett's, the counterfactual account, andthe transfer of energy account, in addition to, (if we like) complex,conjunctive distinctions like Quinn's or McMahan's. The fact that eachaccount faces counterexamples may not show that each is incorrect, butsimply that none is the unique distinction. In that case, it seems thatthe sensible approach is to acknowledge this variety of distinctions,and to ask with respect to each, whether it is morallysignificant.[30] I believe my discussion has shown thatthere is no decisive reason to say that any of these distinctions ismorally significant, as long, that is, as we remember that intentionplays no part in the distinction between doing and allowing harm. Ihave no doubt that the intention with which an agent acts can make adifference to the moral status of her act. (Exactly how is a bigquestion—for another paper.) The claim that doing harm is noworse than allowing harm flies in the face of powerful intuitions tothe contrary. I believe that these intuitions can be partiallyexplained away by pointing to other morally significant distinctions(distinctions concerning intentions, difficulty or ease of avoiding theharm, etc) that often coincide with the distinction between doing andallowing harm. A residue remains, however, and we seem faced with aconflict between theory and intuitions about cases.BibliographyCited WorksBennett, Jonathan, “Acting and Refraining,”Analysis 28 (1967)–––, “Morality and Consequences,”;The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. II. S. McMurrin (ed)Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981.–––, “Negation and Abstention: TwoTheories of Allowing,”; Ethics, 104 (October 1993),pp. 75-96–––, The Act Itself. Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1995.Callahan, Daniel, “Killing and Allowing to Die,”The Hastings Center Report, vol. 19 (January/February1989).Casey, John, “Killing and Letting Die: A Reply toBennett,” Killing and Letting Die, 1st. ed. Ed. B.Steinbock. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.Chandler, John, “Killing and Letting Die—Putting theDebate in Context,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy,68 (1990).Dinello, Daniel, “On Killing and Letting Die,”;Analysis, Vol. 31 (1971), pp. 84-86.Donagan, Alan, The Theory of Morality, Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1977.Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza, eds. Ethics Problems andPrinciples, Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992.Foot, Philippa, “Morality as a System of HypotheticalImperatives,” Philosophical Review, 81 (1972).–––, “The Problem of Abortion and theDoctrine of Double Effect,” Virtues and Vices and OtherEssays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978.–––, “Morality, Action and Outcome,”Ted Honderich, ed., Morality and Objectivity (London,England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).Frankfurt, Harry, “Alternate Possibilities and MoralResponsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 65 (1969).Glover, Jonathan, Causing Death and Saving Lives. London:Penguin, 1977.—“It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I DoIt,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 49(1975).Hanser, Matthew, “Killing, Letting Die and Preventing Peoplefrom Being Saved,” Utilitas Vol. 11, No. 3, November1999.Haydar, Bashdar, “Consequentialism and the Doing-AllowingDistinction,” Utilitas Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2002.Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989.—“The Additive Fallacy,” Ethics,99 1988.Lewis, David, “Causation,” in his PhilosophicalPapers, vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Mackie, John, The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1974.Malm, Heidi, “In Defense of the Contrast Strategy,” inFischer and Ravizza, 1992.McMahan, Jeff, “Killing, Letting Die and WithdrawingAid,” Killing and Letting Die, 2nd ed. Norcross, A. andSteinbock, B. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. (Originallypublished in Ethics, 103 (January 1993.)McMahan, Jeff, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Marginsof Life, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.Munthe, Christian, “The Morality of Interference” inTheoria, vol. 65, issue 1, 1999.Quinn, Warren S., “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: TheDoctrine of Doing and Allowing,” Killing and LettingDie, 2nd. Ed. (ed. Norcross, A. and Steinbock, B.) New York:Fordham University Press, 1994. (Originally published inPhilosophical Review 98, no. 3 (July 1989)).Rachels, James, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,”New England Journal of Medicine 292 (1975). “Killing andLetting People Die of Starvation,” Philosophy, 54, no.208 (April 1979).Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.Singer, Peter, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1. no. 3 (1965).Smart, J.J.C, “An Outline of a System of UtilitarianEthics,” in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism Forand Against. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.Utilitarianism For and Against. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973.Strudler, Alan and David Wasserman, “The First Dogma ofDeontology: the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Notion of aSay,” Philosophical Studies. October, 1995.Thomson, Judith Jarvis, “Killing, Letting Die and the TrolleyProblem,” Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in MoralTheory. Ed. W. Parent. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1986.–––, The Realm of Rights. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1990.Tooley, Michael “Abortion and Infanticide,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2, no. 1 (1972).Trammell, Richard, “Saving and Taking Life,” TheJournal of Philosophy 72 (1975).–––, “The Presumption Against TakingLife,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 3(1978).–––, “The Nonequivalency of Saving Lifeand Not Taking Life.” The Journal of Medicine andPhilosophy, 4, no. 3 (September 1979).Unger, Peter, Living High and Letting Die. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996.Williams, Bernard, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” inJ.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For andAgainst. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.Further ReadingAnscombe, G.E.M., Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1958.–––, “Modern Moral Philosophy,”Ethics, Religion, and Politics. Collected PhilosophicalPapers. III. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1981.Aronsen, J., “On the Grammar of Cause,”Synthese, 22, 1971.Bradley, Ben and Stocker, Michael, “‘Doing andAllowing’ and Doing and Allowing,” Ethics 115(2005.Chandler, John, “Killing and Letting Die—Putting theDebate in Context,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy,68 (1990)Conway, David, “Is Failing to Save Lives as Bad asKilling?” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 5(1988).Davidson, Donald, “Agency,” Essays on Actions andEvents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.Feinberg, Joel, Doing and Deserving. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1970.Haslett, D.W., “Moral Taxonomy and Rachels' Thesis,”Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 10, Number 4, October1996.Horowitz, Tamara, “Philosophical Intuition and PsychologicalTheory,” Ethics, vol. 108. Issue 2 (1998).Howard-Snyder, Frances, “The Heart ofConsequentialism,” Philosophical Studies 1994.Isaacs, Tracy, “Moral Theory and Action Theory, Killing andLetting Die,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 32.Issue. 4, 1995.Kamm, Frances Myrna, “Killing and Letting Die: Methodologicaland Substantive Issues,” Pacific PhilosophicalQuarterly, 64 (1983).–––, “Harming Some to Save Others,”Philosophical Studies, 57 (1989).–––, Morality, Mortality. 2vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 and 1996.McMahon, Christopher, “The Paradox of Deontology,”Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991).Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986. Norcross, Alastair and Steinbock, Bonnie, ed.,Killing and Letting Die, 2nd Ed. New York: Fordham University Press,1994.Norcross, Alastair, “Killing and Letting Die,” inA Companion to Applied Ethics: Blackwell Companions toPhilosophy, Frey, R.G. (ed). Blackwell, 2003.Oddie, Graham, “Killing and Letting Die: Bare Differences andClear Differences,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 88.Issue 3 (1997).Rickless, Samuel, “The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing,”Philosophical Review 1997 vol. 106 (4).Russell, Bruce, “On the Relative Strictness of Negative andPositive Duties,” Killing and Letting Die, 1st ed. Ed.B. Steinbock. Englewood, Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.Steinbock, Bonnie, Norcross, Alastair (eds) Killing andLetting Die,2nd edn. New York:Fordham University Press,1994.Tooley, Michael, “An Irrelevant Consideration: Killing VersusLetting Die,” reprinted in Killing and Letting Die, Steinbockand Norcross, ed.Vihvelin, Kadri; Tomkow, Terrance, “The Dif,” The Journal ofPhilosophy. April 2005.Other Internet ResourcesEuthanasia and End-of-Life Decisions (maintained by Lawrence Hinman, University San Diego)Related Entries causation: counterfactual theories of | causation: the metaphysics of | consequentialism | euthanasia: voluntaryAcknowledgmentsI am grateful to Jonathan Bennett, Tom Downing, Dan Howard-Snyder, HudHudson, Phillip Montague, Alastair Norcross, John Hawthorne, StuartRachels and Kadri Vihvelin for comments on earlier drafts of thispaper. I am also grateful to the Bureau for Faculty Research at WesternWashington University for support while writing it. Copyright © 2007 byFrances Howard-Snyder<franhs@cc.wwu.edu> |
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