The doing/allowing distinction plays an important role in our thinking about a number of legal issues, such as the need for criminal process protections, prohibitions on torture, the permissibility of the death penalty and so on. These are areas where, at least initially, there seem to be distinctions between harms that the state inflicts and harms that it merely allows. In this paper I will argue for the importance of the doing/allowing distinction as applied to state action. Sunstein, Holmes, Vermeule (...) and others have presented influential arguments for the claim that where the state is concerned the doing/allowing distinction has no moral significance, even if it does elsewhere. I show that these arguments can be resisted. In doing so, I defend some important distinctions and principles that help us understand the state’s role in protecting people from harm. (shrink)

Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents enable harm. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence to support (...) the claim that some important cases in the moral philosophical literature are best viewed as instances of enabling harm rather than doing or allowing harm. We also present evidence that enabling harm is regarded as normatively distinct from doing and allowing harm when it comes to assigning compensatory responsibility. Moral philosophers should be exploring the tripartite distinction between doing harm, allowing harm, and enabling harm, rather than simply the traditional bipartite distinction. Cognitive scientists and psychologists studying moral judgment, who have so far largely adopted the bipartite distinction in this area of research, should likewise investigate the tripartite distinction. (shrink)

Many assume that the best, and perhaps only, way to address the so-called Problem of Evil is to claim that God does not do evil, but that God merely allows evil. This assumption depends on two claims: the doing-allowing distinction exists and the doing-allowing distinction is morally significant. In this paper I try to undermine both of these claims. Against I argue that some of the most influential analyses of the doing-allowing distinction face grave difficulties and that these difficulties are (...) only exacerbated when applied to God. Against I argue that broadly Kantian considerations give a better explanation of the moral differences in paradigm cases than the doing-allowing distinction and, when applied to God, effectively dissolve the moral significance of the doing-allowing distinction. The upshot of this is that those who claim God does evil are no worse off than those who claim God allows evil regarding the PoE. (shrink)

Conversations with patients and families about the allow-natural-death (AND) order, along with the standard do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order during end-of-life (EOL) decision-making, may create engagement and understanding while promoting care that can be defended using enduring notions of autonomy, beneficence, and professional duty. Ethical, legal, and pragmatic issues surrounding EOL care decision-making seem to suggest discussion of AND orders as one strategy clinicians could consider at the individual practice level and at institutional levels. A discussion of AND orders, along with traditional (...) DNR orders is presented. This is followed by argument and counter-argument focused on ethical, legal, and practical issues germane to EOL care decision-making associated with use of AND orders. (shrink)

Altruistic punishment has been shown to invade when rare if individuals are allowed to opt out of cooperative ventures. Individuals that opt out do not contribute to the common enterprise or derive benefits from it. This result is potentially significant because it offers an explanation for the origin of large-scale cooperation in oneshot interactions among unrelated individuals. Here, we show that this result is not a general consequence of optional participation in cooperative activities, but depends on special assumptions about cooperative (...) pay-offs. We extend the pay-off structure of optional participation models to consider the effects of economies and diseconomies of scale in public-goods production, rival and non-rival consumption of goods, and different orderings of the pay-offs of freeriding and opting out. This more general model highlights the kinds of pay-offs for which optional participation favours cooperation, and those in which it does not. (shrink)

Most deontologists claim that it is more objectionable to do harm than it is to allow harm of comparable magnitude. I argue that this view faces a largely neglected puzzle regarding the moral relevance of an agent's past behavior. Consider an agent who chooses to save five people rather than one, where the one person's life is in jeopardy because of something the agent did earlier. How are the agent's obligations affected by the fact that his now letting the one (...) die would retroactively make it the case that he has killed? I argue that the most promising deontological responses to this question are difficult to defend. Further, it is unclear how the deontologist can resolve a further set of cases, in which commonsense intuition indicates that an agent is required to terminate a threat she initiated more recently in preference to a threat she initiated less recently. (shrink)

Of great importance to many non-consequentialists is a claimed moral difference between doing and allowing harm. I argue that non-consequentialism is best understood, however, as consisting in three morally distinct categories where commentators typically identify two: standard doings of harm, standard allowings of harm, and denials of resources. Furthermore, the moral distinctness of denials of resources is independent of whether denials are doings or allowings of harm, I argue. I argue by way of matched examples, as well as by way (...) of two widely accepted features of non-consequentialism: stringent rights of persons, and the susceptibility of resources to distribution within political society. (shrink)

Physician-written “do not resuscitate” DNR orders elicit negative reactions from stakeholders that may decrease appropriate end-of-life care. The semantic significance of the phrase has led to a proposed replacement of DNR with “allow natural death” . Prior to this investigation, no scientific papers address the impact of such a change. Our results support this proposition due to increased likelihood of endorsement with the term AND.

The article takes as its starting point the assumption that (a) competing accounts of moral rules should be judged by the distribution of benefits and burdens which would arise from everyone accepting these rules, and that (b) these benefits and burdens are understood in a way which has a substantial resource or freedom-based component. This starting point is compatible with contractualism and various forms of rule consequentialism, and will yield a morality in which people have significant freedoms. The main claim (...) of the article is that as a consequence of these freedoms, and because of phenomena connected with cost internalization, this morality will also impose strong constraints on harming and weak constraints on allowing harm. Thus the starting point ends up vindicating commonsense morality. (shrink)

Death concept, death definition, death criterion and death test pluralism has been described by some as a problematic approach. Others have claimed it to be a promising way forward within modern pluralistic societies. This article describes the New Jersey Death Definition Law and the Japanese Transplantation Law. Both of these laws allow for more than one death concept within a single legal system. The article discusses a philosophical basis for these laws starting from John Rawls' understanding of comprehensive doctrines, reasonable (...) pluralism and overlapping consensus. It argues for the view that a certain legal pluralism in areas of disputed metaphysical, philosophical and/or religious questions should be allowed, as long as the disputed questions concern the individual and the resulting policy, law or acts based on the policy/law, do not harm the lives of other individuals to an intolerable extent. However, while this death concept, death definition, death criterion and death test pluralism solves some problems, it creates others. (shrink)

Fiona Woollard presents an original defence of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, according to which doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. She argues that the Doctrine is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition, and offers a moderate account of our obligations to offer aid to others.

The emphasis of systems and synthetic biology on quantitative understanding of biological objects and their eventual re-design has raised the question of whether description and construction standards that are commonplace in electric and mechanical engineering are applicable to live systems. The tuning of genetic devices to deliver a given activity is generally context-dependent, thereby undermining the re-usability of parts, and predictability of function, necessary for manufacturing new biological objects. Tolerance and allowance are key aspects of standardization that need to (...) be brought to biological design. These should endow functional building blocks with a pre-specified level of confidence for bespoke biosystems engineering. However, in the absence of more fundamental knowledge, fine-tuning necessarily relies on evolutionary/combinatorial gravitation toward a fixed objective. (shrink)

Two of the greatest challenges facing humanity are environmental degradation and the persistence of poverty. Both can be met by instituting a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) that would slow pollution and natural-resource depletion while collecting funds to avert poverty worldwide. Unlike Hillel Steiner's Global Fund, which is presented as a fully just regime governing the use of planetary resources, the GRD is meant as merely a modest but widely acceptable and therefore realistic step toward justice. Paula Casal has set forth (...) various ways in which this step might be improved upon. Solid counter-arguments can be given to her criticisms and suggestions. But to specify the best (effective and realizable) design of an appropriate global institutional mechanism with some confidence, economists, political scientists, jurists, environmental scientists, and activists would need to be drawn in to help think through the immense empirical and political complexities posed by this urgent task. (shrink)

Many environmental policies seem to rest on an implicit distinction between doing and allowing. For example, it is generally thought worse to drive a speciesto extinction than to fail to save a species that is declining through no fault of our own, and worse to pollute the air with chemicals that trigger asthma attacks thanto fail to remove naturally occurring allergens such as pollen and mold. The distinction between doing and allowing seems to underlie certain versions of the precautionary principle, (...) and insofar as the precautionary principle rests on this distinction, it diverges from direct consequentialist approaches to risk management.There are two ways in which such reliance on the doing/allowing distinction may be defended: by appeal to indirect consequentialist considerations, and by appeal to deontological considerations. Neither approach is unproblematic; however, retention of a distinction between doing and allowing in environmentalpolicy is consistent with the widespread intuition that there is something prima facie valuable about the world as we find it. (shrink)

Most theorists working on moral obligations to refugees conceive of western states as innocent bystanders with duties to aid refugees if they can do so at little cost to themselves. This paper challenges this dominant theoretical framing of global displacement by highlighting for the first time certain practices of western states in response to refugee flows such as border violence, detention, encampment and containment which may make us question whether states who engage in such practices are indeed innocent. This paper (...) provides the first normative analysis of these practices by seeking to classify them as either doing or allowing harm and invoking the fundamental moral imperative central to core common moral commitments - not to harm innocent people - to suggest that certain western states are not merely failing to aid refugees and allowing harm to come to them, but are instead responding to their calls for aid by harming them. (shrink)

This paper examines Kahneman and Tversky’s standard explanation for preference reversal due to framing effects in the famous “Asian flu” case. It argues that, alongside with their “loss/no gain effect” account, an alternative interpretation, still consistent with the empirical data, amounts to a more reasonable psychological explanation for the preference reversal. Specifically, my hypothesis is that shifts in the baseline induce shifts in the agents’ classification of the same action as “doing harm” rather than “allowing harm to occur”, and that (...) people are risk-seeking when it comes to avoid causing extra deaths–doing harm–and risk-averse when it comes to preventing more deaths–by the means of allowing other deaths to occur as a side effect. I then survey the two most influential concurrent accounts in the moral literature, with respect to the relation between the loss/no gain and the doing/allowing distinction: Horowitz’s reductionist conclusion, which argues that the latter collapses into the former, and Kamm’s rebuttal, which claims instead that the two distinctions can be pulled apart. I eventually explain why my interpretation differs from both these positions. (shrink)

An extensive body of research suggests that the distinction between doing and allowing plays a critical role in shaping moral appraisals. Here, we report evidence from a pair of experiments suggesting that the converse is also true: moral appraisals affect doing/allowing judgments. Specifically, morally bad behavior is more likely to be construed as actively ‘doing’ than as passively ‘allowing’. This finding adds to a growing list of folk concepts influenced by moral appraisal, including causation and intentional action. We therefore suggest (...) that the present finding favors the view that moral appraisal plays a pervasive role in shaping diverse cognitive representations across multiple domains. -/- . (shrink)

The ground is cleared for an analysis of the distinction between making something happen and allowing it to happen. Warnings are given against undue attention to superficial verbal niceties of ‘allow’ and ‘let’, especially the ‘bubble phenomenon’ and ‘the match phenomenon’.

In recent years, the practices of artists in non-artistic environments have set my mind in motion. Where before I could marvel at the visual outcomes of the artistic process and would want to understand how processes of creating meaning could be described, I am now particularly struck by the way in which artists are present, by their way of looking, how they make decisions, when and how they act, how they take responsibility. I have conversations with them and ask questions (...) to better understand their processes, and I explore literature to find people with a similar quest. This process of moving and being moved lies at the heart of the book 'The Artistic Attitude'"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

You find yourself in a court of law, accused of having hit someone. What can you do to avoid conviction? You could simply deny the accusation: 'No, I didn't do it'. But suppose you did do it. You may then give a different answer. 'Yes, I hit him', you grant, 'but it was self-defence'; or 'Yes, but I was acting under duress'. To answer in this way-to offer a 'Yes, but...' reply-is to hold that your particular wrong was committed in (...) exceptional circumstances. Perhaps it is true that, as a rule, wrongdoers ought to be convicted. But in your case the court should set the rule aside. You should be acquitted. Within limits, the law allows for exceptions. Or so we tend to think. In fact, the line between rules and exceptions is harder to draw than it seems. How are we to determine what counts as an exception and what as part of the relevant rule? The distinction has important practical implications. But legal theorists have found the notion of an exception surprisingly difficult to explain. This is the longstanding jurisprudential problem that this book seeks to solve. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, Defeasibility in Question, introduces the topic and articulates the core puzzle of defeasibility in law. Part II, Defeasibility in Theory, develops a comprehensive proof-based account of legal exceptions. Part III, Defeasibility in Action, looks more closely into the workings of exceptions in accusatory contexts, including the criminal trial. (shrink)

Harm minimisation has been proposed as a means of supporting people who self-injure. When adopting this approach, rather than trying to stop self-injury immediately the person is allowed to injure safely whilst developing more appropriate ways of dealing with distress. The approach is controversial as the health care professional actively allows harm to occur. This paper will consider a specific objection to harm minimisation. That is, it is a misguided collaboration between the health care professional and the person who self-injures (...) that is morally and clinically questionable. The objection has two components. The first component is moral in nature and asserts that the health care professional is complicit in any harm that occurs and as a result they can be held morally responsible and subject to moral blame. The second component is clinical in nature and suggests that harm minimisation involves the health care professional in colluding in the perpetuation of self-injury. This element of the objection i... (shrink)

Attempts to defend the moral significance of the distinction between doing and allowing harm directly have left many unconvinced. I give an indirect defence of the moral significance of the distinction between doing and allowing, focusing on the agent's duty to reason in a way that is responsive to possible harmful effects of their behaviour. Due to our cognitive limitations, we cannot be expected to take all harmful consequences of our behaviour into account. We are required to be responsive to (...) harmful consequences that have some feature that makes it easy for us to become aware of them. I show that, under Jonathan Bennett's analysis of the doing/allowing distinction, harm that is incidentally done has such a feature, which is not shared by harm that is incidentally allowed. Any plausible analysis of the doing/allowing distinction will entail a similar asymmetry. It follows that, prima facie, an agent who incidentally does harm has violated a moral requirement (the deliberative requirement) which an agent who incidentally allows harm has not violated. 1. (shrink)

Armed with expanded federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research and new methods for deriving pluripotent stem cells, stem cell researchers in the U.S. are poised to proceed with unprecedented speed toward the development of new clinical therapies. Staring into the new dawn of regenerative medicine, many observers may assume that the only responsible route to the clinic, both scientifically and ethically, is through FDA-approved clinical trials processes. Conventional wisdom dictates that, like pharmaceutical drugs and the use of biological (...) therapeutics, stem cell-based therapies will have to pass through a series of controlled studies — initially to assess safety and toxicity, then efficacy and comparative efficacy — before they can be justifiably administered to patients outside a clinical trials context. (shrink)

Reliable misrepresentation is getting things wrong in the same way all the time. In Mendelovici 2013, I argue that tracking theories of mental representation cannot allow for certain kinds of reliable misrepresentation, and that this is a problem for those views. Artiga 2013 defends teleosemantics from this argument. He agrees with Mendelovici 2013 that teleosemantics cannot account for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation, but argues that this is not a problem for the views. This paper clarifies and improves the argument (...) in Mendelovici 2013 and response to Artiga's arguments. Tracking theories, teleosemantics included, really do need to allow for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation. (shrink)

Many philosophers display relaxed scepticism about the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect, suspecting, without great alarm, that one or both of these Doctrines is indefensible. This relaxed scepticism is misplaced. Anyone who aims to endorse a theory of right action with Nonconsequentialist implications should accept both the DDA and the DDE. First, even to state a Nonconsequentialist theory requires drawing a distinction between respecting and promoting values. This cannot be done without accepting some deontological (...) distinction. Second, if someone is going to accept any deontological distinction she should accept either the DDE or the DDA or some replacement. Finally, anyone who accepts either the DDE or the DDA should accept both doctrines or a replacement of each. Unless both Doctrines can be defended or given a defensible replacement, any Nonconsequentialist is in trouble. (shrink)

In January 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published online Giubilini and Minerva's paper, ‘After-birth abortion. Why should the baby live?’.1 The Journal publishes articles based on the quality of their argument, their contribution to the existing literature, and relevance to current medicine. This article met those criteria. It created unprecedented global outrage for a paper published in an academic medical ethics journal. In this special issue of the Journal, Giubilini and Minerva's paper comes to print along with 31 articles (...) from some of the best scholars in the world, from the broadest range of perspectives on abortion and infanticide, including those strongly critical of Giubilini and Minerva.The killing of a baby is among the most shocking of human practices. I am strongly opposed to the legalisation of infanticide along the lines discussed by Giubilini and Minerva. But I would like to explain why a journal of medical ethics published an article examining infanticide and now devotes a special issue to bringing a wide range of perspectives for further examination of these issues.Infanticide has been practised throughout human history for various reasons and continues to be practised today throughout the world. In rare cases, infanticide can be practised openly and legally—for example, as specified under the ‘Groningen Protocol’, in the Netherlands. The Groningen Protocol allows doctors to end the life of neonates at the request of their parents if the infant is experiencing hopeless and unbearable suffering.2But medical infanticide arguably occurs elsewhere other than in the Netherlands today.In neonatal intensive care, it is not uncommon for a doctor to withdraw artificial ventilation with the consequence that a baby dies.3 If anyone else performed that act, including the parents of the child, it would be viewed as an act of homicide, in some cases …. (shrink)

Venneman and colleagues argue that “do not resuscitate” (DNR) is problematic and should be replaced by “allow natural death” (AND). Their argument is flawed. First, while end-of-life discussions should be as positive as possible, they cannot and should not sidestep painful but necessary confrontations with morality. Second, while DNR can indeed be nonspecific and confusing, AND merely replaces one problematic term with another. Finally, the study’s results are not generalisable to the populations of physicians and working nurses and certainly do (...) not support the authors’ claim that there is a movement to replace DNR with AND. (shrink)

This article aims to defend the thesis—originally defended by Alan Donagan but rejected by Philippa Foot and most others—that the doing/allowing distinction is based upon the difference between acting and failing to act. The paper restricts its focus to the second aspect of this thesis: that every allowing is most fundamentally a failure to act. Foot rejects the thesis because of cases of ‘enabling harm’—such as removing a respirator—in which the agent allows some harm by way of doing something. The (...) troubling aspect of these cases, however, disappears when two points are better understood. First, an independent sequence must be understood in relation to the agent's own actions. Second, sometimes an agent has ongoing actions, such as the use of a respirator. (shrink)

How does the act of explaining influence learning? Prior work has studied effects of explaining through a predominantly proximal lens, measuring short-term outcomes or manipulations within lab settings. Here, we ask whether the benefits of explaining extend to academic performance over time. Specifically, does the quality and frequency of student explanations predict students’ later performance on standardized tests of math and English? In Study 1 (N = 127 5th−6th graders), participants completed a causal learning activity during which their explanation quality (...) was evaluated. Controlling for prior test scores, explanation quality directly predicted both math and English standardized test scores the following year. In Study 2 (N = 20,384 10th graders), participants reported aspects of teachers’ explanations and their own. Controlling for prior test scores, students’ own explanations predicted both math and English state standardized test scores, and teacher explanations were linked to test performance through students’ own explanations. Taken together, these findings suggest that benefits of explaining may result in part from the development of a metacognitive explanatory skill that transfers across domains and over time. Implications for cognitive science, pedagogy, and education are discussed. (shrink)

The formal analysis of normative systems has traditionally focused on their deontic dimension rather than on their potestative dimension; yet, a growing amount of works aims at shedding light on the notion of power, its norm changing potential and its general interactions with deontic concepts. The present article contributes to this line of inquiry by adopting the following perspective: a normative system can be metaphorically seen as an agent that allocates abilities (powers) in order to promote the fulfillment of certain (...) desires (deontic directives), and in doing so regulates its behavioural domain. Our analysis emphasizes the instrumental nature of power, while clarifying the distinction between ‘being allowed’ and ‘being enabled’ and unveiling new patterns of interaction between deontic and potestative concepts. Operationally, we formulate this framework in terms of conditional rules, and provide a corresponding logic programming (ASP) implementation. (shrink)

Many people think that the moral reason against doing harm is stronger than the moral reason against allowing harm. What should these people think about doing and allowing good? I address this question by distinguishing two ways of understanding the doing/allowing distinction. The agency view implies that the moral reason for doing good is stronger than the moral reason for allowing good. The imposition view implies that the moral reason against preventing good is stronger than the moral reason against failing (...) to do good. I defend the imposition view and explore its implications for the comparative strength of harm-based and benefit-based reasons. (shrink)

Patients participating in the shared benefits of publicly funded health care enjoy the benefits of treatments tested on previous patients. Future patients similarly depend on treatments tested on present patients. Since properly designed research assumes that the treatments being studied are—so far as is known at the outset—equivalent in therapeutic value, no one is clinically disadvantaged merely by taking part in research, provided the research involves administering active treatments to all participants. This paper argues that, because no other practical or (...) moral considerations count decisively against so doing, we could and should oblige patients to agree to receive indicated treatment within the terms of any concurrent research protocols. This ensures their treatment will benefit not only themselves but also future patients through contributing to new knowledge. By analogy with the paying of income tax, patients should not be allowed to “veto” their social responsibility to take part in clinical research. (shrink)