Doing and Allowing

AbstractIs there a morally significant distinction between doing and allowing? The most natural way to understand this question is as asking whether doing harm is worse, in itself, than allowing harm. This is how I will, for the most part, understand the question. There is, however, a different way to put it. Perhaps the claim of moral significance is not that doing harm is worse than allowing harm, but that doing harm is more difficult to justify than allowing harm. One may reasonably wonder whether the latter claim could be based in something other than the former claim, but it is, at least on its face, worth considering separately. I will briefly do this later. The question of the moral significance of the doing/allowing distinction has received much attention in recent years, in large part due to the perceived connection with the moral issues surrounding euthanasia (seeEuthanasia). Much of the debate about doing and allowing focuses on the distinction between killing and letting die (seeKilling), which appears to be a specific instance of the distinction between doing harm and allowing harm (seeHarm). But this is not quite right. Most cases of killing involve doing harm, and most cases of letting die involve allowing harm. However, there are cases in which death is not a harm, and therefore in which killing does not involve doing harm. These are precisely those cases in which the moral case for euthanasia, either active or passive, is strongest. When continued life involves overwhelming suffering, death may be a benefit to the sufferer (seeDeath). It follows that even if doing harm is morally worse, in itself, than allowing harm, active euthanasia may not differ morally from passive euthanasia. In what follows, however, I shall ignore this complication, and treat killing as a specific instance of doing harm.