A challenge to common sense morality

Ethics

Volumn 108, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 394-418

  McMahan, Jeff ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009334794     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233811     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Jonathan Bennett, "Morality and Consequences," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 2, ed. Sterling McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981), pp. 47-116.
2. Because there are instances of action that are intuitively classified as "makings" but are also naturally described as allowing an outcome to occur, I will often refer to the general contrast that Bennett is exploring as the "generic" positive-negative distinction rather than as the making-allowing distinction.
3. For discussion, see Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (New York: Random House, 1995).
4. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 111.
5. The first version of his analysis appeared in "Whatever the Consequences," Analysis 26 (1966):83-102;
6. reprinted in Killing and Letting Die, 2d ed., ed. Bonnie Steinbock and Alastair Norcross (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994).
7. The wording here is Bennett's, except that I have substituted "Agent" where he uses the first person.
8. In an earlier discussion of these cases as they appeared in Bennett's Tanner Lectures, I interpreted Bennett as deploying them in an effort to establish the moral neutrality of the making-allowing distinction. But, while he did indeed expressly say that he regarded them as "establishing the neutrality thesis," he also had a further reason for producing them, which was to note that the absence of any moral difference between Cancel and No-help is so obvious that it must surely make one wonder whether the positive-negative distinction is what underlies our intuitive discriminations between making and allowing. I regret having failed to acknowledge this importantly self-critical aspect of his argument. See his "Morality and Consequences," pp. 89-95,
9. my "Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid," Ethics 103 (1993): 258-61 (reprinted in Steinbock and Norcross). In the book, the doubt that Bennett raises about his own analysis no longer focuses on the absence of a moral difference between Cancel and No-help but relies instead on our intuitive sense that the agency in Cancel is generically negative.
10. Bennett himself observes that "there is no opportunity in Kick for Agent to prevent the vehicle from rolling. What is true is that if he had left the rock in place, it would have prevented the vehicle from rolling" (p. 67).
11. I owe this suggestion to Bruce Bethell.
12. Again, I convert Bennett's first person to third person.
13. There is an alternative explanation. Bennett may want to reduce this element of the Dependence Account to a proposal of Alan Donagan's to which he is more kindly disposed. The proposal is in Donagan's The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
14. On one interpretation, Bennett's Suit is relevantly analogous to Thwarted Theft. There, too, Agent acts to prevent others from using his support to enable them to avoid a bad outcome. To have prevented the outcome, he would not have had to exercise his agency but merely to allow them to keep what was his by right.
15. For an argument that some writers, myself included, develop their analyses of the distinction between making and allowing so that it conforms to common moral intuitions about, for example, killing and letting die, see Tracy L. Isaacs, "Moral Theory and Action Theory, Killing and Letting Die," American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995):355-68.
16. A generic version of this example is sketched in Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 109.
17. Cases of this sort are discussed in Noam Zohar, "Collective War and Individualistic Ethics: Against the Conscription of 'Self-Defense'," Political Theory, vol. 21 (1993), sec. III.