In What Circumstances, If Any, Is There a Moral Difference Between Doing and Allowing Harm?

This thesis investigates whether there is a moral difference between intentionally doing harm and allowing harm.

My conclusion is that in general, but not always, there is a moral difference between intentionally doing harm and intentionally allowing harm. This moral difference arises in two ways.

Firstly there is a moral difference based on casual factors. Doings of harm, I argue, genuinely cause bad outcomes. By contrast, allowings do not genuinely cause anything, but do feature in a causal explanation of the harm. In general, genuine causation of harm is more blameworthy than causal explanation of harm, and this explains the moral difference between the doing and allowing of harm.

This, however, is not the only source of blameworthiness for the doing and allowing of harm. Another source of moral responsibility is intention; a bad intention can explain (teleologically) the wrongness of the harm, and this is true whether the harm arose from a doing or an allowing.

I argue that talk of explanation, and not causation, is a better way to understand moral responsibility for doing and allowing harm. An account which features explanation is more instructive than simply focussing on causation. I show that one instructive way of thinking about explanation is the account offered by Aristotle in his Physics and deploy that account in developing my view.

Both causal and teleological explanations contribute to an understanding of the wrongness of doing and allowing harm. Both types of explanation are needed to understand the wrongness of bringing about the harm.

These distinctions have several practical applications. They can help understand the moral difference between euthanasia and withholding/withdrawing treatment, the moral difference between termination of pregnancy and allowing the mother to die, and the moral difference between lying and misleading by omission.