Action, Ethics, and Responsibility

2. A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing

2 Warren Quinn1 and Philippa Foot2 have both given versions of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) that justify a moral distinction between doing something to bring about harm and doing nothing to prevent harm. They argue that whereas it is justified to allow one person to die so that one can save a larger number of people, it is not permissible to kill one person to achieve the same purpose. They defend the distinction on the basis of an account of positive and negative rights. Consequentialist moral philosophers, on the other hand, hold that if killing and letting die have the same consequences, there is no moral difference between the two acts.3 Thus, the DDA’s role seems to be to undercut the consequentialist position by using a moral distinction between doing and allowing to support a moral distinction not found in consequentialist thinking between killing and letting die. In justifying the DDA, the nonconsequentialist must do two things: explain what difference the DDA captures, and show that its application has intuitive results through the use of examples. In this essay, I shall show that the examples typically used to support the DDA do not in fact do so. Contrary to the deontological ethics supported by the DDA, I argue that it can be justified to minimize harm by killing a smaller number of people, in preference to letting a greater number die. But unlike for the consequentialist, my position is that the distinction between killing and letting die does have moral significance. I shall examine what other nonconsequentialist considerations, besides the appeal to positive and negative rights, could account for the distinction , and will suggest a middle position between the deontological and consequentialist approaches to the ethics of killing. A Reappraisal of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing David K. Chan 26 D. K. Chan 1 Harmful Agency Not anyone who fails to prevent harm is allowing harm to occur. The person who allows harm is an agent. He is aware that he is in a position to prevent a certain harm to one or more other persons, but he decides not to do what he can to prevent the harm. He can carry out his decision by inaction, or by getting out of the way, or by doing something else, or he may have to actively refrain from actions that would prevent the harm. On the other hand, someone who is unaware that he is able to prevent a harm, or who has not decided about whether to prevent the harm, or who fails to carry out a decision to prevent the harm (because of weakness of will, or an unsuccessful attempt), will also have failed to prevent harm. But he would not be an agent who allows harm in the relevant sense.4 Judith Jarvis Thomson has pointed out that the moral relevance of the distinction between bringing about and allowing harm has to be judged using examples where “choice is presumably in question” (Thomson 1986a, 79). Thomson famously devised the Trolley examples, in which a driver or bystander has to choose between letting a runaway trolley cause the deaths of five people, or diverting the trolley onto a sidetrack where one person will be killed.5 These and similar examples have drawn conflicting accounts of what the right choice is and why it is right to choose in that way. If the examples capture a moral distinction, what exactly is the distinction and why is it morally significant?6 Quinn is well aware that the DDA does not make a straightforward distinction between acts and omissions. The distinction that Quinn carves out is between what he calls (harmful) positive and negative agency. He holds that the DDA discriminates in favor of negative agency and against positive agency, where the result of the agency is that someone is harmed (Quinn 1993, 153). Rescue I is his example of the favored kind of agency. The rescuer has to choose between saving five people from drowning in one place and a single person in similar danger in another place. It seems justified to save the five and fail to save the one. Rescue II illustrates the disfavored positive agency. The rescuer can save the five only by driving over and killing someone who is trapped on the road. It is not justified to proceed with the rescue of the five. Quinn’s distinction does not correspond with the distinction...