Doing and Allowing Harm
Fiona Woollard
Abstract
Doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. If a boulder is rushing towards Bob and stopping the boulder would cost you your life, you may refuse to stop the boulder. You may not push the boulder towards Bob to save your own life. This principle—the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing—requires defence. This book provides a detailed analysis of the distinction between doing and allowing harm. Drawing on this analysis, this book shows that the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition. Such protection against impos ... More
Doing harm seems much harder to justify than merely allowing harm. If a boulder is rushing towards Bob and stopping the boulder would cost you your life, you may refuse to stop the boulder. You may not push the boulder towards Bob to save your own life. This principle—the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing—requires defence. This book provides a detailed analysis of the distinction between doing and allowing harm. Drawing on this analysis, this book shows that the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing is best understood as a principle that protects us from harmful imposition. Such protection against imposition is necessary for morality to recognize anything as genuinely belonging to a person, even that person’s own body. As morality must recognize each person’s body as belonging to her, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing should be accepted. Each person requires permission to allow harm. This permission should not be absolute: if you walk by a child drowning in a pond, you must stop and help. This book defends a moderate account of our obligations to aid, tackling arguments by Peter Singer and Peter Unger that we must give most of our money away and arguments from Robert Nozick that obligations to aid are incompatible with self-ownership. It is a strong mark in favour of any general ethical theory if it can defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. Both Scanlonian contractualism and Brad Hooker’s rule-consequentialism can use the defence of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.
Keywords:
ethics,
deontology,
doctrine of doing and allowing,
action/omission,
obligations to aid,
Peter Singer,
Peter Unger,
contractualism,
rule-consequentialism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199683642 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683642.001.0001 |
