## 1. The Contrast Strategy and Analysis-Independent Justifications



James Rachels (1975) provides a classic example of the contrast
 strategy.[3]
 He offers us a pair of cases--in one, Smith drowns his young
cousin in the bathtub; in the other, Jones plans to drown his young
cousin, but finds the boy already unconscious under water and refrains
from saving him. The two cases are designed to be exactly alike except
that the first is a killing and the second a letting die. Rachels
invites us to agree that Smith's behavior is no worse than
Jones's. He then concludes that killing per se is no worse than
letting die per se, and that if typical killings are worse than
typical lettings die that must be because of other factors. 



Rachels' argument depends on two claims: (1) the two cases are
exactly alike except that one is a killing and the other a letting
die; (2) that there is no moral difference between the cases. Both
these claims have been challenged.



Scott Hills (2018) challenges (1). He argues that the cases are not
properly equalised because Jones has the ability to either kill his
cousin or to let him die, while Smith does not have the option to
merely let his cousin die. Hills adds a third case in which the agent
finds his cousin drowning and chooses to kill him rather than let him
die. Hills argues that this behaviour is worse than both Jones'
letting die and Smith's killing while lacking the option to let
die. Hills argues that the best explanation for our intuitions about
this third case is that killing is worse than letting die.



Although most people struggle to see a moral difference between
Smith's behavior and Jones' behavior, Frances Kamm (2007)
argues that the cases might not be intuitively morally equivalent. She
suggests that we test the apparent moral equivalence by asking whether
we could imposes the same losses on Jones and Smith, assuming these
were necessary to bring the child back to life. Kamm claims that it
would be permissible to kill Smith to bring the child back to life but
impermissible to kill Jones for this reason (Kamm 2007, 17). If Kamm
is right, then there is an intuitive difference between the two
 cases.[4]




Even if Rachels were correct that Smith's and Jones's
behavior is morally equivalent, we may not be able to infer the moral
equivalence of killing and letting die in general (where other things
are equal) from this. Shelly Kagan argues that this inference assumes
that "if a factor has genuine moral relevance, then for any pair
of cases, where the given factor varies while others are held
constant, the cases in that pair will differ in moral status"
(Kagan 1988). He claims, moreover, that this assumes the Additive
Assumption, the view that "the status of the act is the net
balance or sum which is the result of adding up the separate positive
and negative effects of the individual factors" (Kagan 1988,
259). He raises several objections to the Additive Assumption.
Firstly, one might describe a pair of cases that are exactly alike
except that one is a killing and the other a letting die, where the
first intuitively seems far worse than the second. If this pair of
cases is as good as Rachels' pair, then either the inference is
valid in both cases--to prove the contradiction that killing is
both worse and not worse than letting die--or it is invalid in
both cases. Secondly, one might raise the rhetorical question: why
addition--rather than, say, multiplication or some other
function? Similarly, Kamm (1996, 2007) defends a Principle of
Contextual Interaction according to which a property can behave
differently in one context than
 another.[5]




Quinn (1989) argues that would-be counterexamples like the Bathtub
case involve a misunderstanding of the claim that the distinction
between doing and allowing harm is morally significant. This claim
should be understood as more about moral justification than about
other forms of moral evaluation. Quinn thinks that the distinction
between doing and allowing is morally significant not because there is
some kind of intrinsic disvalue attached to doing harm, but because
doing and allowing harm run up against different kinds of rights. On
Quinn's view, the right against doing harm is stronger in that
it takes much more to defeat or over-ride it. Thus much stronger
considerations are needed to justify doing harm than to justify merely
allowing harm (other things being equal). Suppose doing harm is much
harder to justify than merely allowing harm (other things being
equal). An unjustified killing and an unjustified letting die may
still be equally bad. Quinn illustrates this with an example: You have
a right of privacy that the police not enter your home without your
permission. This right is easier to defeat than your right that other
ordinary citizens not enter your home without permission. Nonetheless,
unjustified break-ins by the police are, if anything, morally worse
than unjustified break-ins by ordinary citizens. Quinn claims that
this is because "moral blame for the violation of a right
depends very much more on motive and expected harm than on the degree
to which the right is defeasible" (Quinn 1989, 290) 



Samuel Scheffler (2004) also attempts to settle the moral significance
of the distinction between doing and allowing without offering an
account of the distinction. He argues that: "despite the lack of
consensus about which candidate is to be preferred, our practice of
treating one another as responsible agents requires us to make some
distinction of this kind" (Scheffler 2004, 216).
Scheffler's paper is rich and correspondingly difficult to
interpret. However, the main argument seems to consist of two parts.
In the first part, Scheffler argues that to hold oneself and others to
moral requirements, one must already (a) draw a distinction between
what one does and what one merely allows (or some other similar
distinction) and (b) treat this distinction as morally important. To
hold oneself to moral requirements involves seeing oneself as having
reason to act in one way rather than another. One must therefore see
oneself as an agent who is charged with the task of regulating
one's conduct in accordance with reasons. However, regulating
one's behavior is something one does, not something one merely
allows to happen. Thus to hold oneself to a moral requirement is to
attach a special importance to, and accept special responsibility for,
what one does (Scheffler 2004, 220-227). In the second part,
Scheffler argues that this distinction in moral significance needs to
be included in the moral requirements themselves: i.e. the set of
requirements we hold each other to must draw a distinction between
what the agent does and what she merely allows. Scheffler argues that
holding oneself to a set of moral requirements which require one to
make optimal use of our causal opportunities is unstable. Such a set
of moral requirements would require a purely instrumental view of the
agency of oneself and others: we assess conduct purely in terms of
whether it produces the optimal available outcome. However, holding
oneself and others to moral requirements involves adopting a
non-instrumental view of agency: (1) The reasons one has to regulate
one's conduct must be non-instrumental; (2) Holding oneself and
others to moral requirements involves seeing failure to live up to
such requirements as meriting responses such as blame. Because whether
blame is merited is not settled by whether it would produce the best
outcome, this requires us to recognise non-instrumental reasons
(Scheffler 2004,
 227-236).[6]



Others have taken an account of the nature of the doing/allowing
distinction to be a necessary starting point for assessing its moral
relevance. On this view, we cannot assess whether the difference
between doing and allowing is morally significant until we know what
that distinction is. Before discussing some prominent approaches to
the analysis of the doing/allowing distinction and related assessments
of its moral relevance, we will clear the way by identifying some
related distinctions that are sometimes confused with the
doing/allowing distinction.


## 2. Distinguishing Distinctions



Suppose some upshot occurs and would not have occurred if the agent
had behaved in some different way. The question of whether the agent
counts as doing or allowing may be conflated with or distorted by
questions that should be kept distinct from it, like the questions of
(i) whether the agent intended the upshot, (ii) whether she could
easily have prevented the upshot, (iii) whether she guaranteed the
upshot or merely made it probable, and even (iv) whether the
agent's behavior was morally objectionable. It can easily be
seen that these do not coincide with the distinction between doing and
allowing.



(i) Consider the distinction between cases where an agent intends the
upshot and cases where she does not. If you drive your car into
someone's body, without realizing it, or because you were trying
to avoid killing a larger number, and she dies as a result, you
undoubtedly killed her, even if you did not intend her death.
Conversely, someone may intentionally allow a child to drown in order
to inherit his fortune.



(ii) It tends to be easier to avoid killing than to avoid letting die,
but this is only a tendency. Sometimes saving is easier than not
killing. It is easy to throw a life preserver, and it may be difficult
to refrain from killing someone who is threatening one or who has
treated one appallingly. There are even cases where it is physically
difficult to avoid killing; as for example, where one has to hold
tight to a tree to prevent one's (light) vehicle whose brakes
have failed from running into a pedestrian.



(iii) Sometimes the terms 'making' and
'allowing' are used to suggest the difference between
making certain and making possible or probable. For example, in
discussions of the problem of evil, people sometimes say, "Well,
God didn't actually make the murder occur. He just allowed it to
occur." This is best understood as a distinction between raising
the probability of murder to 1 from something less than 1, on the one
hand, and raising the probability of murder from 0 to something higher
but still less than 1. This is a morally significant distinction but
it is not the distinction between doing and allowing. An agent can
kill without guaranteeing death. For example, by adding small
quantities of poison to her victim's meals she may bring about
the death, even though there was a 20% chance that the poison would
not kill her. On the other hand, an agent might guarantee the demise
of a plant by failing to water it in a situation where she is the only
one who can do so.



(iv) Finally, the distinction between doing and allowing harm is
sometimes thought to have, as part of its conceptual content, a moral
element. This thought is rarely made explicit, but the way people are
inclined to classify cases suggests that they are guided by it. There
are 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 is
settled in a trivial, circular, uninteresting way. Secondly, there are
obvious counterexamples to this crude account--morally appalling
cases of letting die--failing to feed one's
children--and morally acceptable cases of killing. We have no
hesitation talking of killing in self-defense.



A more controversial question is whether the doing/allowing
distinction should be distinguished from another related distinction.
Sometimes harms occurs because the agent performed some action:
because she pressed a switch or pushed a rock. Sometimes the harm
occurs because the agent did not perform some action: because she did
not press a switch or did not push a rock. We will refer to this as
the action/inaction distinction. There do appear to be cases where the
action/inaction distinction and the doing/allowing distinction come
apart. An actor might spoil a performance by failing to turn up (doing
by inaction) (Foot 1978, 26). A potential benefactor might let a
starving child die by ringing up her attorney to cancel a direct debit
(allowing by action) (Bennett 1981, 91). However, the status of these
cases is a matter of disagreement. The relationship between the
doing/allowing distinction and the inaction/inaction distinction will
be particularly relevant in discussion of
 'Safety Net' Cases. 


## 3. The Trolley Problem and the Doing/Allowing Distinction



At this point, it is worth discussing the relationship between the
doing/allowing distinction and the famous Trolley Problem. The Trolley
Problem dates back to Philippa Foot's (1978) discussion of a
pair of examples: In the first case, a judge must choose between
framing and killing an innocent man and allowing five innocents to be
killed in a riot. In the second, a trolley driver must choose between
turning a trolley so that it runs over an innocent man attached to a
track and allowing the trolley to run over and kill five innocent
people. Foot, claimed that it was wrong to kill in the first case, but
not wrong in the second. Foot noted that such cases might motivate
someone to accept the Doctrine of Double Effect, which distinguishes
between harm that is strictly intended and harm that is merely
foreseen. However, Foot argues that the cases can be explained by the
distinction between doing and allowing harm: the judge must choose
between killing one and merely allowing five to die, while the trolley
driver must choose between killing one and killing five. Judith Jarvis
Thomson (1986) modified the case so that it was a bystander, not the
driver, who had to make the choice. The difference was important,
since the bystander is clearly choosing between killing and letting
die and yet it still seems permissible to turn the trolley. This
undermines Foot's claim that the difference between doing and
allowing explains our intuitions about these cases. So what made the
difference? A considerable amount of ink has been spilled attempting
to answer this question.



22 years after putting forward the bystander version of the trolley
case, Thomson (2008) changed her mind and argued that the consensus
that it is permissible for the bystander to turn the trolley was
mistaken. She offers the reader a third option, of turning the trolley
onto and killing oneself. Obviously, few of us would take that option.
If so, she argues, we are not entitled to turn the trolley onto a
stranger. Doing so would be like stealing someone's wallet to
give to charity. Thomson argues that it is still wrong to turn the
trolley even without the option of turning it on oneself. Fitzpatrick
(2009) has responded to Thomson by casting doubt on the analogy
between stealing money to give to charity and turning the trolley on a
stranger rather than oneself. We know that stealing is wrong except in
exceptional cases -- and the fact that the agent would prefer not
to donate her own money doesn't make it an exceptional case. The
Trolley Case is exceptional, which is precisely why it has generated
so much discussion. Fitzpatrick argues that it must be permissible to
sacrifice others when we would not sacrifice ourselves: morality
cannot demand such extreme self-sacrifice but nonetheless the reasons
to minimise damage remain
 compelling.[7]




The bystander trolley case might seem to undermine the claim that the
doing/allowing distinction is morally relevant. After all, it seems as
if it is permissible for the bystander to do harm to one person rather
than allow harm to five others. Derek Parfit (2017) uses the bystander
trolley case in this way, arguing that considering such cases shows
that the fact that a threat is heading towards one group of people
rather than another gives no reason not to redirect the threat.
However, as Kamm (2020) points out, even if the fact that a threat is
heading to one group rather than another is not morally relevant in
itself, it might supervene on other morally relevant features. Kamm
asks us to consider a version of the trolley case where there are five
people on each track. The bystander must choose between killing five
and letting five die. If not harming had no priority over not aiding,
then it would seem the bystander should be morally indifferent between
these two options - but it is clear that they are morally
required not to turn the trolley from five to five. As Kamm concludes,
it seems that, if turning the trolley is permissible, it is not
permissible because there are no differences between turning the
trolley and not turning the trolley. Instead, it is permissible
despite these differences. 



Although the Trolley Problem is often associated with the
doing/allowing distinction, the two should be kept separate. First, we
must settle whether the doing/allowing distinction is morally
significant. If it can be shown that the doing/allowing distinction is
morally significant, the Trolley Problem should be understood as a
further challenge. To respond to this challenge one must either (a)
appeal to some additional distinction to explain why it is permissible
for the bystander to turn the trolley towards five to save one, even
though it is not normally permissible to kill one to save five or (b)
show that we should abandon the intuition that it is permissible for
the bystander to turn the trolley. 



Let's turn to some candidate accounts of the doing/allowing
distinction, and where appropriate, the moral significance or
insignificance of each account. In both doing and allowing, an agent
is responsible for or relevant to a bad upshot--such as a death
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'. We will in general use the former but due to
occasional awkwardnesses in practice, we will sometimes use the terms
"positively relevant to an upshot" and "negatively
relevant to an upshot" for cases of "doing" and
"allowing",
 respectively.[8]


## 4. Causing and Not Causing Not to Occur



One natural suggestion is that the agent who does harm causes it to
occur; whereas the agent who allows harm doesn't cause it, but
simply fails to prevent it where she could have done
 so.[9]
 This suggestion has immediate moral implications. It seems true by
definition (almost) that you can be causally responsible only for
upshots that you cause. And it is arguably true that you can be
morally responsible only for what you are causally responsible
for.



This argument gets into trouble when we reflect on the fact that we
are often responsible for upshots we allow: the death of the
houseplants or the child's illiteracy. When we notice that, in
these cases, the plants die or the child remains uneducated because of
some failure on the agent's part, it becomes clear that the
agent does, in some sense, cause the upshots. Moreover, most widely
accepted contemporary accounts of causation imply that some event or
fact involving these agents causes the deaths or illiteracy. For
example, the counterfactual account of causation--according to
which (very roughly) event *E* causes *F* if and only if
had *E* not occurred *F* would not have occurred
either--implies that it was the agent's failure to water
the plants that caused the
 deaths.[10]
 John Mackie's INUS
 condition[11]--according
 to which *E* causes *F* if and only if *E* is
a(n insufficient but) necessary part of a(n unnecessary but)
sufficient condition for *F*--implies that the fact that
the agent failed to water the plants causes the plants to
 die.[12]



Reflecting on this may lead us to distinguish a wide sense of
causation (where *S* causes *X* if and only if
*S* is causally relevant to *X*) from a narrow sense of
causation. Bronner (2018) argues that an agent causes an outcome in
this narrower sense of causation just if his behaviour falls on the
doing side of the doing/allowing distinction. He argues that
recognising two notions of causations explains why we are inclined to
assert both (a) the claim that the agent who merely allows harm does
not cause harm and (b) claims that e.g. the agent caused the house
plant to die by failing to water it. Unfortunately, these assertions
are explained in a way that suggests that appeal to causation will not
help us defend the moral relevance of the distinction between doing
and allowing harm.


## 5. Counterfactual Accounts



We are concerned then with a contrast between two ways the behavior of
agents is causally relevant to upshots. One suggestion is to say that
when the agent is positively relevant to the upshot, the upshot would
not have occurred if the agent had never existed. Suppose, for
example, the victim dies because I push his head under water. He
wouldn't have died if I had never existed. On the other hand,
suppose he is in deep water and cannot swim and I don't save
him. He would have drowned anyway if I had never existed. In these two
cases, the counterfactual account draws the line in the intuitively
correct way.



However, suppose that the youngest son of a King squanders his
inheritance and begs his elder brother, the new King, for food. The
new King refuses and the younger brother starves to death. If the
elder brother had never existed, the younger brother would have
inherited the throne and would not have starved to death. Yet, it is
clear that the new King merely allows his brother to die and does not
kill him (Kagan 1989, 96). 



This may lead us to revise the counterfactual test and ask whether the
upshot would have happened if the agent had not been present.
Howard-Snyder (2002) argues that this narrower counterfactual also
fails. She asks us to "suppose an SS officer, Franz, tortures
someone to death. But this is standard practice in the Gestapo. If
Franz had stayed home with a sore throat, or if Franz had never
existed, his pal Hans would have done the torturing, in the same way,
at the same time Franz did. If the counterfactual account is correct,
then Franz is negatively relevant to the victim's death by
torture. That is, Franz merely allowed the death to occur"
(Howard-Snyder 2002). Yet, it is very clear that Franz killed the
victim. Moreover, as Howard-Snyder points out "the fact that
Hans was waiting in the wings in no way diminishes Franz's
wrongdoing in this case." (Howard-Snyder 2002).



Alan Donagan (1977) suggests a similar account of the distinction. To
determine whether the agent is positively or negatively relevant to an
upshot, we should consider what would have happened if the agent had
not acted at the relevant moment, or what would have happened if the
agent had 'abstained from intervening in the course of
nature'. It isn't entirely clear what we are supposed to
imagine when we imagine this but perhaps it's that the agent is
asleep or in a trance or in some other way unable to exercise her
agency. Now--with respect to some behavior that led to some
upshot, we might ask: would that upshot have occurred if the agent had
abstained from intervening in the course of nature? If it would have,
the agent allowed the upshot. If it would not have, then she did it
(her relevance to the upshot is positive).



Bennett offers the following counterexample to Donagan's
account: Suppose that an alarm will go off if Henry pushes a button
which requires a fairly specific movement. Henry is subject to a
barely controllable muscular spasm which, if allowed to run its
course, would jerk his hand up, hitting the button and setting off the
alarm. Bennett argues that on Donagan's account Henry counts as
positively relevant to the alarms silence (as keeping it silent)
whereas intuitively he seems to have merely refrained from setting the
alarm off (Bennett 1995, p.
 113).[13]




After discussing, and dismissing, a similar stream of counterfactual
accounts, Kagan notes we may be tempted to refine the counterfactual
test still further. We may want to say that an agent does harm when
the harmful upshot would not have occurred if the given reaction had
not occurred. However, on this account the distinction between doing
and allowing simply disappears. For in the classic cases of merely
allowing harm, the harm would not have occurred if the agent had acted
differently. Suppose I watch Maude drown. If I had reacted
differently, if I had not refused to save her, then she would not have
drowned. Thus this revised test still fails to capture the intuitive
distinction (Kagan 1989, pp. 97-98).



Counterfactual accounts may be used to support the claim that doing
harm is worse than allowing harm on the grounds that, on such
accounts, allowing harm is simply a matter of not interfering or
letting nature take its course. The underlying thought seems to be
this: if something bad happens when you do not exist (or are not
present or are unable to exercise your agency) then you aren't
responsible for it. If we turn our attention to another world where
you do exist (or are present or able to exercise your agency), but
which is otherwise exactly like the first, it seems that your
contribution to, and thus your responsibility for, the upshot is the
same. Thus we should not hold you responsible in the second case
either. Bennett (1995) argues that this is a mistake. If some bad
upshot occurs when you do not exist or cannot exercise your agency,
then you are not responsible for it. Your agency is not involved and
the bad upshot's occurrence implies nothing about the morality
of your behaviour. But this is simply not true in the other cases. In
these cases, you could have prevented the bad upshot and did not. The
bad upshot is a consequence of how you exercised your agency and does
have implications for the morality of your behaviour. " Only a
muddle could lead anyone to think that 'I could have prevented
it, but I did not' is significantly like 'I had nothing to
do with it'" (Bennett 1995, 119).


## 6. Sequences, Action, Inaction and Positive and Negative Rights



Both Philippa Foot and Warren Quinn attempt to defend the moral
relevance of the doing/allowing distinction by connecting it with a
moral distinction between positive and negative rights. 



Foot (1978, 1984, 1985) argues that the difference between doing and
allowing harm is at heart a difference in the agent's
relationship to a harmful sequence. We are able to pick out the
sequence leading to a harmful upshot. Foot distinguishes between
initiating (setting the harmful sequence going); sustaining (keeping
the harmful sequence going when it would otherwise have stopped);
enabling (removing some barrier which would have brought the harmful
sequence to a halt) and forbearing to prevent (failing to take some
action which would have brought the sequence to a halt). Initiating
and sustaining both count as doing harm; enabling and forbearing to
prevent are ways of merely allowing harm. Foot is clear that, in her
view, the doing/allowing distinction is not the same as the
action/omission distinction. "[Forbearing to prevent] requires
an omission but there is no other general correlation between omission
and allowing, commission and bringing about or doing. An actor who
fails to turn up for a performance will generally spoil it rather than
allow it to be spoiled" (Foot, 1978, 26) 



Foot (1978, 1984, 1985) argues that the moral relevance of the doing
/allowing distinction rests on a distinction between positive and
negative rights. Negative rights are rights against interference
whereas positive rights are rights to aid or support. Negative rights
are, in general, stronger than positive rights: it typically takes
more to justify an interference than to justify the withholding of
goods and services. Foot connects this to her analysis of the
doing/allowing distinction by arguing that interference implies
breaking into an existing sequence and initiating a new one and that
therefore violation of a right of non-interference must involve doing,
rather than merely allowing, harm (Foot, 1984, 284).



Warren Quinn (1989) shares Foot's view that the doing/allowing
distinction rests on the difference between positive and negative
rights, but offers both an alternative analysis and a deeper defense
of the claim that negative rights are stronger than positive rights.
While Foot argues that these is no necessary connection between action
and doing or inaction and mere allowing, Quinn treats the
action/inaction distinction as fundamental to the analysis of the
doing/allowing distinction. On Quinn's view, an agent is
positively relevant to a harmful upshot when his most direct
contribution to the harm is an action, whether his own or that of some
 object.[14]
 His relevance is negative when his most direct contribution is an
inaction, a failure to prevent the harm. An agent's most direct
contribution to a harmful upshot of his agency is the contribution
that most directly explains the harm. One contribution explains harm
more directly than another if the explanatory value of the second is
exhausted in the way it explains the first.



The key difference for Quinn is between cases where the agent produces
the result by an action and cases where she produces it by an
inaction--pushing someone's head under water or refraining
from throwing a life preserver. Quinn holds that we do not need
further analysis of the action/inaction distinction. However, Quinn
adds a modification to his account which means that he does not treat
the doing/allowing distinction and the action/inaction distinction as
the same. Sometimes, Quinn says, your relevance to a death can be
positive, you can kill, in other words, even though you don't
act. This happens, for example, when you are on a train headed towards
some drowning victims you wish to save when you notice someone tied to
the tracks ahead of you. You can stop the train but you choose not to
in order to reach your destination. Quinn believes that you kill in
this case, because the train acts as your agent, taking you where you
want to go, and crushing the person tied to the tracks in the process.
On the other hand, if you had chosen not to stop the train for some
other reason but you would have not minded had someone else stopped
the train, then your failure to stop the train would not have
constituted a killing.



Like Foot, Quinn believes that the key here is the distinction between
negative and positive
 rights.[15]
 Doing harm involves the violation of negative rights; merely allowing
harm involves the violation of positive rights. Since negative rights
are more stringent than positive rights, doing harm is harder to
justify than merely allowing harm (*ceteris paribus*). Quinn
agrees with Foot that negative rights are intuitively stronger than
positive rights. However, Quinn seeks to provide further argument by
linking the precedence of negative rights over positive rights with
the conditions for a person's body to genuinely belong to him:




> 
> [i]n such a morality [neutral vis a vis killing and letting
> die] the person trapped on the road has a moral say about whether his
> body may be destroyed only if what he stands to lose is greater than
> what others stand to gain. But then surely he has no real say at all.
> For, in cases where his loss would be greater than the gain to others,
> the fact that he could not be killed would be sufficiently explained
> not by his authority in the matter but simply by the balance of
> overall costs. And if this is how it is in general--if we may
> rightly injure or kill him whenever others stand to gain more than he
> stands to lose--then surely his body (one might say his person)
> is not in any interesting moral sense his. It seems rather to belong
> to the human community, to be dealt with according to its best overall
> interest.... Whether we are speaking of ownership or more
> fundamental forms of possession, something is, morally speaking, his
> only if his say over what may be done to it (and thereby to him) can
> override the greater needs of others (Quinn 1989, 308-309).
> 



To say that one has a negative right against being harmed is to say
that it is (at least, prima facie) wrong to harm one unless one wishes
to be harmed. It is crucial that we add the phrase "unless one
wishes to be harmed", since without it, the precedence of
negative rights wouldn't give the victim any special say about
his own body, because it would be just as wrong to harm him even if he
asked to be harmed, and it would be wrong for him to harm himself. So,
the crucial thing is that the victim has some sort of a say about what
happens to himself(i.e., others are morally bound to respect his
wishes with respect to his body to a certain extent). Quinn's
claim is that if there 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 idea of ownership of one's body,
etc. One person's wishes about what happens to her body do often
clash with someone else's wishes about what happen to his. For
example, Susan wishes to marry Paul, but Paul doesn't wish to
marry Susan. Morality obviously cannot give all such wishes
precedence. So, we need to give some subset of them precedence. Quinn
argues that we cannot give positive rights precedence over negative
rights without
 incoherence.[16]
 And, hence, he concludes that we must give negative rights precedence
over positive rights.



Howard-Snyder(2002) has argued that Quinn's defense does not
show that we should endorse the distinction between doing and allowing
rather than some alternative distinction: "...there are other
ways to divide up rights than the division into positive and negative
rights. We might divide them into the rights of children and the
rights of adults, rights concerning the upper half of the body and
rights concerning the lower half, etc. and then give precedence to one
set over the other whenever they come into conflict. These seem
arbitrary and wasteful, but their rationale seems no worse than
Quinn's. Quinn's is a funny sort of defense of negative
rights. Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't pick out
any special feature of negative rights that makes them specially worth
respecting" (Howard-Snyder 2002).



Woollard (2013, 2015) attempts to fill this gap in Quinn's
argument, offering a new analysis of the doing/allowing distinction
and using the notion of imposition to link the distinction, so
analysed, to the conditions for genuine ownership. 



Woollard returns to Foot's (1978, 1984, 1985) sequence account.
However, she argues that Foot's account is incomplete because it
does not tell us how to distinguish enabling from sustaining, why
enabling is grouped with forbearing to prevent, or what sustaining and
initiating have in common. On Woollard's view, the key question
is whether the relevant fact about the agent's behavior is part
of the sequence leading to harm. Woollard distinguishes between
substantial and non-substantial facts. Substantial facts are by nature
suitable to be part of a sequence. Non-substantial facts normally
count as mere conditions for a sequence. Thus anything that is
relevant to a sequence through a non-substantial fact will normally be
a mere condition rather than part of the sequence. However,
non-substantial facts can count as relatively substantial and part of
a sequence under special circumstances, if for example, they are facts
about the absence of a barrier that belongs to the victim.



This leaves Woollard with the following account: If an agent is merely
relevant to a harm through a non-substantial fact about her body or
belongings then her behavior will be merely a condition for, rather
than part of, the harmful sequence. She will count as merely allowing
harm. In contrast, if there is a complete sequence of substantial
facts leading from the agent to an harmful affect on what belongs to
the victim or a third party, her behavior will be part of the harmful
sequence and she will count as doing harm. Woollard uses this analysis
to connect the doing/allowing distinction and imposition. Imposition
involves the needs or behavior of one person intruding upon the proper
sphere of another. When an agent does harm, there is a sequence of
substantial facts connecting her behavior to an unwanted effect on
what belongs to this victim: this is a harmful causal imposition. When
an agent is forbidden from allowing harm, she is required to make some
substantial fact about her body or her belongings true for the sake of
another. Finally, Woollard argues that for our bodies and other
belongings to genuinely belong to us we require protection from both
causal and normative imposition: we require constraints against doing
harm and permissions to allow harm. 



Like Quinn and Woollard, Frances Kamm (1996, 2007) also appeals to the
idea of rights or entitlements. Kamm argues that letting die has two
essential properties which can make letting die more acceptable than
killing: (1) the victim only loses life that he would have had with
the agent's help at that time; (2) the alternative is for the
agent to be interfered with. These features make a moral difference
because the victim has a stronger claim (relative to the agent) to
what he has independently of that agent's current efforts. Kamm
argues that these features are essential properties of a letting die,
but may also be found in some cases of killing and such killings will
be morally equivalent to merely letting die. 


## 7. The 'Most of the Things He Could have Done' Account



Jonathan Bennett thinks that the fundamental distinction between doing
and allowing is between cases where the upshot occurs because of
one's action and cases where the upshot occurs because of
one's inaction--although he prefers to replace
"action/inaction" talk with "positive/negative
fact" talk (Bennett 1967, 1981, 1993, 1995). When Bennett
discusses the contrast between positive and negative relevance to
harm, he is attempting to capture a deep, philosophically interesting
distinction that underlies our talk of 'doing and
allowing' 'making and letting','killing and
letting die'. He acknowledges that the correspondence between
his distinction and the distinctions we make in everyday life and
language may be inexact. He says that my behavior is negatively
relevant to an upshot if a negative fact about my behavior is the
least informative fact that suffices to complete a causal explanation
of it; whereas my behavior is positively relevant to that upshot if a
positive fact about my behavior is the least informative fact about my
conduct that suffices to complete a causal explanation of it. For
example, if I jog while you drown, your drowning could be explained by
the fact that I jogged, but it could also be explained 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 upshot is positive if most of the ways she could have behaved at
the time would not have led to the upshot; otherwise, it is
 negative.[17]
 For example, suppose I douse a slug with salt and it dies as a
result. My relevance to its demise is positive, since most of the ways
I could have behaved would not have led to the death. On the other
hand, if it dies because I fail to move it from the path of a car,
then most of the ways I could have behaved at the time would have led
to its death, so my relevance to the death is negative.



Most people conclude that on this account doing harm is in itself no
worse than allowing harm. If some upshot obtains because of the way
you behaved, then the fact that there were many ways (rather than only
a few) you could have behaved which would also have had that result
may seem obviously morally
 insignificant.[18]
 This conclusion is surprising, even shocking. Bennett's
account, however, does offer an alternative explanation of why we tend
to think of killing as worse than letting die. He claims, quite
plausibly, that it is morally worse to be causally relevant to a bad
upshot one could easily have avoided than a similarly bad upshot one
could have avoided only with great difficulty. If most of the ways one
could have behaved would have led to an upshot, then it was probably
somewhat difficult or onerous to avoid the upshot; whereas if most of
the ways one could have behaved would not have led to an upshot, then
it was probably fairly easy to avoid the upshot. However, on
Bennett's view when killing and letting die are equally
difficult to avoid, and all other factors are equal, then there is no
moral difference between them. Thus the doing/allowing distinction is
not itself morally relevant. 



The two most persistent objections to Bennett's accounts are the
Immobility Objection and the Sassan Counterexample. There are two
types of Immobility Counterexample:



> 
> 
> Immobility 1: If Henry stays completely still, dust will settle and
> close a tiny electric circuit, setting off an explosion which will
> kill Bill. If Henry makes any move whatsoever, the dust will not
> settle and the circuit will not close (Quinn 1989, 295).
> 
> 
> 
> Immobility 2: If Henry makes any move whatsoever, he will set off a
> motion detector which will set off an explosion, killing Bill. If he
> stays completely still, the motion sensor will not go off and Bill
> will not die (Quinn 1989, 296).
> 
> 
> 



Most ways Henry could move in Immobility 1 would not lead to
Bill's death. Thus on Bennett's account, Henry counts as
positively relevant to Bill's death if he stays still and the
dust settles on the circuit in Immobility 1. This conflicts with our
intuition that Henry would merely allow Bill to die by staying still.
On the other hand, most ways Henry could move in Immobility 2 would
lead to Bill's death. Thus on Bennett's account Henry is
negatively relevant to Bill's death if he waves an arm and sets
off the motion sensor in Immobility 2. Again, this conflicts with our
intuitions: intuitively waving an arm and setting off the explosion
would be killing Bill. As Quinn (1989, 296) notes, Bennett's
account also clashes with our moral intuitions. It seems permissible
for Henry to stay still in Immobility 1 if this is necessary to save
five other lives even if Bill will die, but impermissible for him to
move to save five others in Immobility 2 if he would thereby set off
the motion sensor and kill Bill. 



Some
 philosophers[19]
 argue that such examples refute Bennett's account because
Bennett wrongly classifies immobility as positive and motion as
negative. The suggestion is that immobility is incompatible with
positive relevance to an upshot. Nifty slogan: 'You cannot do
anything by doing nothing.' 



However, there are some cases which do intuitively involve doing harm
by remaining still. In Bennett's example, Agent finds himself
sitting on Patient's chest. If he makes any move, this will
relieve the pressure enough for her to breathe, but if he stays still
she will suffocate and die (Bennett 1995, 98).



Bennett attempts to explain away the intuition that immobility is
negative by arguing that we are misled by the fact that in most actual
states of affairs, for any upshot that we care about, staying still
will be on "the roomy side of the line." As Bennett notes:
"It takes work to rig things so that keeping still is almost the
only route to some interesting upshot. Perhaps this is why, when
people confront a result that is produced by Agent's immobility,
they immediately and invalidly infer that this is a case of
allowing" (Bennett 1995, 99).



Bennett also suggests that our intuitions about doing and allowing are
responsive to two distinctions: his positive/negative distinction and
the active/passive distinction identified by Alan Donagan (see the
section on
 counterfactual accounts).
 An agent is active relative to an upshot if the upshot would not have
occurred if the agent had temporarily lost the power of agency, i.e.
had been temporarily asleep or unconscious. Bennett asks us to imagine
that Henry finds it very difficult to stay still and he "sweats
and strains" against bodily spasms to do so. He suggests that in
this case, where both analyses agree, we will see Henry's
behaviour as doing. On the other hand, when the two distinctions
disagree, the resulting uncertainty will allow our rule of thumb (rest
equals allowing and motion equals doing) to prevail (Bennett 1995, 99,
113).



Howard-Snyder (2002) is responsible for the second persistent
objection to Bennett's account. In Howard-Snyder's Sassan
counterexample, "An assassin, A. Sassan, is preparing to
assassinate Victor by shooting him. A second assassin, Baxter, is
waiting across the street watching Sassan to ensure his success. If
Sassan shows any signs of hesitation, Baxter will shoot Victor
himself. Suppose Sassan knows about Baxter and his intentions and also
knows that he can turn his gun on Baxter instead of on Victor if he so
chooses. Although this thought crosses his mind, he quickly suppresses
it, since he is committed to Victor's annihilation. He shoots
Victor and Victor dies instantly." Most of the ways Sassan could
have behaved would have led to the shooting and death of Victor
(either by himself or by Baxter). So it looks like Bennett's
account will classify Sassan as negatively relevant to Victor's
death e.g. as merely letting Victor die. But as Howard-Snyder points
out, "I just said that Sassan shot Victor. He pulled the
trigger. The gun fired. A bullet flew out of the barrel and entered
Victor's body. Victor died from the bullet wound. A clearer case
of killing is impossible to find" (Howard-Snyder 2002). Bennett
might repeat the point that positive relevance to a death is not
exactly the same as killing. Nevertheless, insofar as we have any
pre-theoretical grip on (and interest in) the concept of positive
relevance to a death, Sassan's relevance to Victor's death
must strike us as positive rather than
 negative.[20]
 And yet Bennett's account implies that it is negative.



In response, Bennett has pointed out that the upshot that concerns us
is not the fact that Victor died (no-one could prevent that) but the
fact that Victor died at *T* (or perhaps, the fact that Victor
died no later than
 *T*).[21]
 He suggested that perhaps Sassan is positively relevant to that,
since most of the ways he could have behaved would have resulted in
Victor's dying later than *T*. But we could, with minimal
artifice, ensure that Baxter is disposed to kill Victor at exactly
*T* if Sassan does not. For example, we could imagine that
there is only a fraction of a second when Victor is vulnerable to a
bullet and that Baxter is located closer to him (or has a faster
acting gun) so that there is a moment *T2* such that
if Sassan does not shoot at *T2*, he will not
succeed in killing Victor, but such that Baxter still has a chance to
get a shot off at *T1* with the result that Victor
will die at *T* (Howard-Snyder 2002).



Howard-Snyder (2002) also explores responses which try to get the
right result by narrowing the description of the upshot. Perhaps
someone may try to argue that Sassan is positively relevant to
something--the fact that Victor is killed with this bullet rather
than that, or more simply the fact that Victor is killed by him rather
than by Baxter. Howard-Snyder argues that the latter suggestion will
not do, since it begs the question. Bennett cannot assume that his
account implies that Sassan kills Victor, since that is the very claim
at issue. Howard-Snyder (2002) also dismisses the suggestion that
Sassan is positively relevant to Victor's being killed with this
bullet rather than that, for we can modify the story in such a way
that if Sassan does not pull the trigger, Baxter can push a switch
that will guarantee that the gun
 fires.*T*).[22]


## 8. 'Safety Net' Cases



When we first describe the doing/allowing distinction, it is tempting
to use standard doings and standard allowings of harm as examples. In
standard doings of harm, the agent performs some action, setting some
physical forces in motion which then run to the victim: Bob pushes a
boulder which rolls down the hill and crushes Victor to death;
Bystander pulls a lever turning the trolley towards the one. In
standard allowing, the agent does not perform some action, refusing to
intervene in some harmful sequence. 



What about cases where the agent removes a safety net from beneath a
falling victim, unplugs a respirator, kicks a rock out of the path of
the runaway vehicle, and other similar cases? In these cases, the
agent performs some action but does not act on the victim directly.
Instead, she removes some barrier to a harmful sequence. Such cases
are now an important part of philosophical discussion of the
doing/allowing distinction, in part because of the recognition that
some apparently standard cases of doing in fact involve removing a
barrier. As Jonathan Schaffer (2000) has argued, in many guns, pulling
the trigger fires a bullet by essentially removing a barrier. 



There are four main approaches to such 'Safety Net'
Cases.


1. Unified All Doings Accounts: The first approach treats all safety
net cases as doings because the upshot occurs because the agent does
something. This in effect, seems to treat the action/inaction
distinction and the doing/allowing distinction as identical. Quinn
(1989) and Bennett (1995) both endorse this approach to safety net
cases.
2. Unified All Allowings Accounts: The second approach treats all
safety net cases as mere allowings. This approach is commonly seen as
following Philippa Foot in holding that all safety net cases count as
enabling harm (removing a barrier that would have prevented a harmful
 sequence).*T*).[23]
 For Foot, enabling is a species of allowing. Rickless (2011) endorses
this approach.
3. Non-Unified Accounts: Others, such as McMahan (1993) and Woollard
(2015), argue that some safety-net cases should be treated as doings
and others as merely allowings.
4. 3rd Category Accounts: Finally, others such as Matthew Hanser
(1999), Timothy Hall (2008) and Barry and Overland (2016), argue that
safety net cases cannot be classified alongside either standard doings
of harm or standard allowings of harm. They fall into a third
category.



Non-Unified Accounts may seem attractive because there are safety net
cases that seem like clear cases of doing harm and others that seem
very much like merely allowing harm. For example,



> 
> 
> Impoverished Village: Having given one's accountant full power
> of attorney one learns that because of a misunderstanding he is
> preparing to sign away 10% of one's income to save the lives of
> people in a remote impoverished village. One phones to instruct him
> not to do it (McMahan 1993,
>  258).[24]
> 
> 
> 
> Hospital: A doctor has just plugged one person into a respirator. If
> the patient is moved or unplugged from the respirator, he will die.
> Five more patients arrive and will die unless plugged into the
> respirator. The doctor unplugs the first patient into order to save
> the five (Rickless 2011, 68).
> 
> 
> 
> Burning Building (Enemy): A person trapped atop a high burning
> building leaps off. Seeing this, a firefighter quickly stations a
> self-standing net underneath and then dashes off to assist with other
> work. The imperilled person's enemy, however, is also present
> and, seeing his opportunity, swiftly removes the net so the imperilled
> person hits the ground and dies. (McMahan 1993, 254)
> 
> 
> 
> Gallows: A innocent man is standing on a gallows with a noose around
> his neck. The agent pulls the lever, releasing the trap door. As the
> innocent man falls through the trap door, the noose tightens around
> his neck, killing him. (See Vihvelin and Tomkow 2005, 194.)
> 
> 
> 



Impoverished Village and Hospital seem like clear cases of merely
allowing harm whereas Burning Building (Enemy) and Gallows seem like
clear cases of doing harm. The challenge for Unified All Doings
Accounts is to explain our intuitions in Impoverished Village and
Hospital, either by arguing that our intuition that these cases count
as allowings is misleading or by showing that these cases have some
special feature which means they should not be seen as standard safety
net cases. Unified All Allowings Accounts face an analogous challenge
when it comes to Burning Building (Enemy) and Gallows. Non-Unified
Accounts and 3rd Category Accounts must give a convincing account of
the status of safety net cases which explains--or explains
away--our intuitions about all such cases. 



Rickless (2011) uses both the above-mentioned tactics to defend the
Unified All Allowings Account. He argues that our intuitions in cases
like Burning Building (Enemy) are distorted by the agent's
malicious intentions. He suggests that if we remove the distorting
factor of malicious intentions, we will see the Burning Building case
as morally equivalent to merely allowing harm (Rickless 2011,
 71).[25]
 Thus, for example, in McMahan's original Burning Building Case,
when a firefighter removes a net from beneath one imperilled person in
order to save five others, he counts as merely allowing harm (McMahan
1993, 262, Rickless 2011, 72). Rickless argues that this would also be
true of a passerby who moved the net from beneath one to save five
(Rickless 2011, 73). Instead of arguing that our intuitions are wrong
about Gallows, Rickless argues that it differs from other safety net
cases. In Gallows, there is no pre-existing threatening sequence.
Gallows should be understood as the initiation of a harmful sequence,
and thus as doing harm. 



McMahan (1993) picks out three key factors which he claims affect
whether withdrawal of a barrier counts as doing or allowing
"...whether the person who terminates the aid or protection is
the person who has provided it, whether the aid or protection is
self-sustaining or requires more of the agent, and whether the aid or
protection is operative or as yet inoperative" (McMahan 1993,
262). Withdrawal of a barrier counts as merely allowing harm if and
only if the barrier was (a) provided by the agent and the barrier is
either (b) not self-sustaining or (c) not yet operative. Thus
McMahan's account seems to correctly classify Impoverished
Village and Hospital as merely allowing harm and Burning Building
(Enemy) as doing harm. It may, however, counterintuitively classify
Gallows as merely allowing harm if the trap door belongs to the agent.
If the trap door belongs to the agent, the continued use of his
resources is required to keep the barrier in place, so the barrier may
not count as self-sustaining. McMahan also allows that sometimes one
agent can act on behalf of another, or they can act as a team. This is
supposed to explain the intuition that in the Burning Building case
where the net is moved to catch five imperilled persons instead of
one, it doesn't matter whether it is the original firefighter or
a second firefighter who does the
 moving.[26]




Matthew Hanser (1999), Timothy Hall (2008) and Barry and Overland
(2016) all argue that safety net cases should not be classified as
either doing or merely allowing harm. They fall into a third category.
Hanser argues that this third category is 'preventing people
from being saved' and it is conceptually distinct from both
doing and allowing harm, but morally equivalent to merely allowing
harm, other things being equal. Other things are not equal i.e.
preventing someone from being saved is worse than merely allowing harm
if the resources the victim needs in order to survive do not belong to
the agent. The moral implications of Hanser's account are thus
similar to those of McMahan's account.



Hall argues that safety net cases belong to the category
'denials of resources' which are both conceptually and
morally distinct from standard doings and standard allowings. Hall
offers three main arguments. First, he argues that previous analyses
have failed to show that allowing harm by denying resources has
anything significant in common with allowing harm by failing to act.
Second, he argues that the moral status of denials of resources depend
to a large extent on which person has a right to the resource in
question while the moral status of standard doings and standard
allowings does not. Third, he argues that constraints against standard
doings of harm and permissions for standard allowings of harm are
rooted in pre-political personal rights but constraints and
permissions regarding denials of resources are not. 



On Barry and Overland's view, safety net cases count as
enablings. When an agent enables harm, there is a 'relevant
action' ("there is an answer to the question of how she
was relevant to [the harm] that refers to something she did"
- see Barry and Overland 2016, 116) but the action is not
connected to the harm through a complete causal process. Barry and
Overland argue that an agent can be expected to bear greater costs to
avoid doing harm than to avoid enabling harm, but greater costs to
avoid enabling harm than merely allowing harm.


## 9. Letting Yourself Do Harm



Recent work raises another important challenge for defenders of the
Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (see Persson 2013 and Hanna 2014,
2015). The challenge is to provide an account of the moral status of
allowing oneself to do or to have done harm. Consider: 



Poisoner: Earlier this morning, Agent deposited a dose of lethal
poison into a teapot from which one person drinks tea at the same time
each afternoon. Unless Agent warns her potential victim now, he will
drink the tea and
 die.[27]



Spasm: Agent feels the onset of a spasm in her finger. If she does not
repress the spasm, her finger will contract around the trigger,
setting off a gun, killing Vic (Persson 2013, 96).



As Hanna points out, failure to warn the potential poison victim would
not be killing, instead Agent would be failing to prevent her past
behavior from constituting killing (Hanna 2014, 679). She would be
allowing herself to have killed. Similarly, failure to repress the
spasm seems significantly different from normally killing. It is
perhaps best characterized as letting oneself (non-intentionally) kill
(Persson 2013, 96).



Persson suggests that deciding the moral status of allowing oneself to
have done harm requires us to choose between a
"present-self-focus", which gives primary importance to
what you do now, and a "self-other divide", based on the
difference between your own agency and agency that is external to you
(Persson 2013, 102-103). He argues that the neither of these is
satisfactory. The present-self focus is mysterious: "why should
what we are doing at the present time have this special
importance?" (110). The self-other divide has "an air of
repulsive moral self-indulgence... why be especially concerned
about your own rights violations rather than the rights-violations of
all people, in proportion to the stringency of the rights
violated?"
 (110).[28]
 Persson has similar worries about holding that letting yourself kill
now is harder to justify than "merely" letting die, even
when the killing would not be intentional under any description. We
must place a lot of weight on whether a natural or non-intentional
cause of death is external or internal to us. Persson challenges this
idea: "The fact that a twitch is internal rather than external
to us cannot make any moral difference" (Persson 2013, 105).



Hanna's discussion of cases suggests that intuitively allowing
oneself to have done harm is neither morally equivalent to doing harm
nor morally equivalent to merely allowing harm. Normally, if we face a
choice between merely allowing harm to one and merely allowing the
same harm to five, we should allow harm to one. However, if Agent
faces a choice between warning her potential poison victim and saving
five others from drowning, then intuitively, she is morally required
to save the one potential poison victim. This suggests that allowing
oneself to have done harm is not morally equivalent to merely allowing
harm (Hanna 2014, 678-9). If we face a choice between doing harm
to one and doing the same harm to five, we should do harm to the one.
But suppose that Agent can give her warning and prevent the poisoning
only by driving down a narrow mountain path, which is blocked by the
body of an innocent, unconscious person. It seems impermissible for
her to do so even if there are five people about to drink from the
poisoned teapot. This suggests that allowing oneself to have done harm
is not morally equivalent to doing harm (Hanna 2014, 681). This
exacerbates the challenge for defenders of the Doctrine of Doing and
Allowing for they must find a justification for treating the fact that
the Agent will be allowing herself to have done harm as somewhat
morally significant but not as so morally significant that it renders
her current behaviour morally equivalent to doing
 harm.[29]
 In Persson's terms, we seem to need to defend *both* the
self-other divide and the present-self-focus.



The cases from the literature on letting oneself do harm may seem
contrived. This may lead one to think that accounting for such cases
is not a central issue for an account of the doing /allowing
distinction. Charlotte Franziska Unruh (2021) argues that such cases
of letting oneself do harm are merely a subset of cases involving
complicated causal chains where the agent is relevant to harm in more
than one way. Moreover, she argues, such cases arise frequently in
cases involving future generations, for example, when we must make
decisions about whether to mitigate climate change resulting from our
past carbon dioxide emissions.


## 10. X-Phi and the Doing/Allowing Distinction



The majority of work on the doing/allowing distinction has appealed to
the author or reader's own intuitions about cases. However, some
work has used experimental data in relation to the doing/allowing
distinction. This is part of a wider phenomenon of use of empirical
data in philosophy known as 'X-Phi'. 



Kahneman and Tversky's (1983) experiment asked respondents to
choose between treatment plans for a deadly disease expected to kill
600 people. The first set of respondents must choose between:


* Option (A): 200 people will be saved.
* Option (B): There is a 1/3 probability that 600 people will be
saved and a 2/3 probability that no one will be saved.



72% of people prefer (A) and 28% of people prefer (B). The second
groups of respondents were asked to choose between:


* Option (C): 400 people will die.
* Option (D): There is a 1/3 probability that no one will die and a
2/3 probability that 600 people will die.



This time, 22% preferred C and 78% preferred D.



The results are striking because (A) is the same outcome as (C) and
(B) is the same outcome as (D). The outcomes are simply described
differently.



Kahneman and Tversky (1984) argue that such experiments show that we
attached greater disvalue to a loss than to the absence of a gain (a
no-gain). Different descriptions of the same outcome lead to different
responses by changing the baseline, affecting whether the outcome is
perceived as a loss or a no-gain. These results may seem to threaten
the relevance of the doing/allowing distinction: first by suggesting
that the intuitions that supported the doing/allowing distinction can
be explained by the loss/no-gain preference; second, by undermining
the reliability of these intuitions. See Sinnott-Armstrong (2008);
Horowitz (1998).



However, as Kamm (2007) argues, the doing /allowing distinction seems
to be intuitively morally relevant independently of the loss/no-gain
distinction. Imagine I am driving five healthy people to hospital to
receive anti-venom against the plague of poisonous snakes that will
hit town and kill all unprotected people in a few hours; I will not
reach the hospital in time unless I drive over the one healthy person
who is blocking my road. It seems intuitively impermissible for me to
kill the one to save the five - even though all victims face
losses. 



Kamm (2007) also argues that the correct application of the
doing/allowing distinction is not affected by framing effects: except
in cases of overdetermination, the correct baseline for the
doing/allowing distinction is determined by what would happen if the
agent did not intervene. Colombo (2018) argues that Kamm's
assurance depends upon prior acceptance of a particular account of the
doing/allowing distinction. Nonetheless, Colombo argues, this need not
undermine our appeal to intuitions in support of the doing/allowing
distinction: our intuitions may be generally trustworthy even if
borderline cases are subject to framing effects.



Cushman et al (2008) claim that their experimental data shows that
moral appraisals affect classification of behaviour as doing or
allowing. Cushman et al do not see this as presenting a special
challenge for the doing/allowing distinction. They see these findings
as adding to "a growing list of folk concepts influenced by
moral appraisal, including causation and intentional action"
concluding that: "the present finding favors the view that moral
appraisal plays a pervasive role in shaping diverse cognitive
representations across multiple domains" (Cushman et al 2008,
281).



Barry et al (2014) use empirical studies to support the 3rd
category approach to safety net cases. They argue that empirical
studies show that removing a barrier to harm (enabling) is treated as
a distinct category, both morally and conceptually distinct from doing
and allowing. Most philosophical work on the doing/allowing
distinction seeks to reflect something that is claimed to be part of
commonsense morality while noting that common intuitions about
particular cases could be incorrect. Given this, there are interesting
questions about how to respond to such empirical studies: does the
fact that enabling is treated as a distinct category settle whether it
is a distinct category for the purposes of the defender (or critic) of
the doing/allowing distinction? 


## 11. Conclusion



The early critics of the doing/allowing distinction focus on appealing
to intuitions to cast doubt on the claim that commonsense morality
attributes significance to the doing/allowing distinction. Rachels
(1975) and Tooley (1972) offer contrast cases in which all other
factors are held constant and killing and letting die seem morally
equivalent. Kamm (2007) and Frowe (2007) respond by arguing that we do
not treat these cases as morally equivalent, while Kagan (1988) and
Quinn (1989) challenge the inference from the moral equivalence of the
cases described to the general equivalence of doing and allowing in
general.



The next wave of critics argues that no account could both provide an
analysis of the distinction that matched our intuitive understanding
of the distinction and was morally relevant (Bennett 1995, Kagan
1989). Quinn(1989), Woollard (2015) Kamm (1996), amongst many others,
attempt to respond to this challenge.



Recent work has produced new challenges about how to account for the
removal of barriers (McMahan 1993, Rickless 2011, Hanser 1999, Hall
2008), past behaviour (Persson 2013, Hanna 2014, 2015) and the
significance of empirical research (Kahneman and Tversky 1983,
Horowitz 1998, Sinnott-Armstrong 2008, Cushman et al 2008, Barry et al
2014).