Two distinctions that do make a difference: The action/omission distinction and the principle of double effect

Philosophy

Volumn 77, Issue 300, 2002, Pages 211-233

  Chappell, Timothy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749467166     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819102000256     Document Type: Review

References (11)

1. Note that my contrast is between generous and niggardly ranges of alternatives, not between large and small ranges. There is a technical reason for this, namely my view that all ranges of alternatives that agents actually have are infinitely large: cp. my 'Option Ranges', Journal of Applied Philosophy 2001.
2. J. L. Austin, 'A Plea for Excuses', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1956-7.
3. This argument develops a suggestion of Nicholas Denyer's, on p. 44 of D. Oderberg and J. Laing, (eds), Human Lives (London: Macmillan, 1997). My thanks to Nick Denyer.
4. For (1) see my 'The Implications of Incommensurability', Philosophy 2001.
5. The term is Joel Feinberg's: see his 'Action and Responsibility' in his collection Doing and Deserving (London: Princeton UP, 1970).
6. A recent locus classicus for the planning conception of intentions is the work of Michael Bratman: Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1987).
7. Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 90, makes the same crude mistake about the idea of proportionality: 'Having allowed this concession to utilitarian calculation, where is a line to be drawn, and why?'.
8. For more about why this is a mistake, and why it is a crude one, see David Oderberg, Moral Theory, pp. 97ff.
9. For another critique of PDE's deployment of this sort of counterfactual question which is in some ways reminiscent of Bennett's, see Helga Kuhse, The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine (Oxford: OUP, 1987), at p. 134
10. with J. L. A. Garcia's comment (Garcia, 'Intentions in Medical Ethics', in Oderberg and Laing, Human Lives (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 168): '[Kuhse] has misunderstood the point of the test. The relevant issue is what is part of the agent's actual plan. What the proponent of intention-sensitive medical ethics wants to show is that death is not part of the agent's plan in permissible instances of letting die. The test helps to show this because changing her expectation of death tends to change the mercy-killer's behaviour, because it forces a change in her plan to end her patient's pain; while it tends not change the behaviour of the physicians [who are not prepared to intentionally kill the patient] because it forces no change in their plans, since their patients' deaths were not planned in the first place. '
11. I first presented the argument that follows in my Understanding Human Goods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), Ch. 3.