Doing vs. allowing harm

Abstract

Is doing harm worse than allowing harm? If not, there should be no moral objection to active euthanasia in circumstances where passive euthanasia is permissible; and there should be no objection to bombing innocent civilians where doing so will minimize the overall number of deaths in war. There should, however, be an objection—indeed, an outcry—at our failure to prevent the deaths of millions of children in the third world from malnutrition, dehydration, and measles.[1] But is doing harm worse than allowing harm? We might divide approaches to this question into two broad kinds: those that attempt to answer it using examples without saying anything about the nature of the distinction. (Following Shelly Kagan, I’ll call this approach ‘the contrast strategy.’) And those that analyze the distinction in depth and try to show that its underlying nature dictates an answer to the moral question.