PY 4826, Life and Death

Topic 3, Killing & Letting Die: Arguments Against the

Significance of the Distinction

One view: There is an intrinsic moral distinction between killing and letting die; i.e., killing is in itself

   worse than letting die.

Two ways of grounding this distinction:

1: The distinction between doing and allowing, i.e. between what we actively do (harming), and what we omit to do (failing to help).

   This is part of the Doctrine of Acts and Omissions (DAO), according to which there is an important moral

   distinction between performing an action that has certain consequences, and omitting to do something 

   that has the same consequences; killing is worse than letting die because it consists in actively harming 

   someone, whereas letting them die consists in omitting to save them.

   2. The distinction between intended and foreseen consequences.

   If we kill, we intend the death. If we let die, the death is foreseen, but not intended.

Consequentialism: we measure morality of conduct entirely by its consequences.  Since killing and letting die have the same consequences, they are morally on a par. 

Moral methodology: consequentialists (such as Kagan) tend to be very sceptical of common-sense moral  

   intuitions, given the danger of moral prejudice and conservatism.  To pre-empt this danger, Kagan  

   emphasises the importance of systematising our moral beliefs by finding one (or more) underlying 

   general moral principle(s) to explain and justify them.  Any moral beliefs which cannot be justified by

   such principle(s) should be jettisoned. 

   Non-consequentialists, such as Kamm, tend to emphasise the dangers of ignoring the moral complexity of

   an issue by giving insufficient weight to important moral beliefs which cannot be subsumed under a

   single (or a few) general moral principle(s).

Arguments against the distinction, on the first account of it (as part of the DAO):

1. Rachels’ Attack: Symmetrical Cases.

The rightness or wrongness of an action or an omission depends entirely on a range of factors that are external to and independent of the distinction between acts and omissions itself. 

These factors include:

                i. Knowledge of what is at stake;

                ii. The agent’s power of whether the death occurs;

                iii. The sacrifice to oneself necessary to prevent the death;

iv. The likelihood that the death will come about.

v. The agent’s motivation.

Rachels’s claim: what makes most cases of killing worse than most cases of not preventing a death is the

presence of these extrinsic differences.  In most cases of letting die, the agent would have had to make a greater sacrifice to prevent the death, the death was less than certain, and the agent was not motivated by malice.

He argues that in pairs of cases where the only difference is that one is an act and the other an omission, the two appear to be morally equivalent. (His pair of nephew-in-the-bathtub examples.)

Rachels’s conclusion: the distinction between killing and letting die, and acts and omissions more generally, is not in itself morally relevant. 

Replies to Rachels’ argument:

i.  Rachel’s case relies on a “sledgehammer effect”, gained by equalizing all the factors in one extreme direction. (Trammell)

ii. In different pairs of cases in which the factors are equalised (so that the only difference is that one is active and the other is passive), we have different judgements about whether or not the case of killing is worse then letting die. (Bennett, Kamm)

Bennett argues that it is better to look directly at whether there are plausible grounds for taking the

distinction to be significant.  He concludes that there are no such grounds. 

2. Bennett’s Attack: the Absence of a Plausible Grounding for the Distinction

Bennett asks on what grounds we make the distinctions we do between killing, and doing something which has the consequence of death, without killing.

A first group of suggestions matches some of Rachels’s:

   -The strength of the agent’s expectation that a death will result;

   -The inevitability of the death

   -Whether the agent acted with the intention of producing the death

But the reply is the same: these factors are morally relevant, but they are distinct from the

distinction between killing and letting die, and do not distinguish all  cases of killing from

cases of letting die.

The other possibilities, he thinks, are these:

   -Moral culpability for the death;

                But in that case the fact that an action is killing rather than letting die cannot support a

judgement of culpability.

-Whether or not the death would have occurred if my action had not occurred while everything else remained the same – i.e. how numerous were the alternative actions I could have performed which would also have led to the death.

And now the reply is that these may distinguish all killings from all cases of letting die, but no convincing reason can be given for thinking them morally relevant.

Why should we think of letting die differently from a kind of wide-optioned killing?