One of the most well-known and
descriptive illustrations of the moral conflict of doing harm versus allowing
harm is the classic trolley problem, introduced by Philippa Foot in the 1960s.
There is a trolley that has run out of control and is heading down a railway
track with five people tied up to it. You’re
standing in front of a lever that can switch the trolley’s direction onto an alternative track. However, one person is tied up
on the alternative track. Do you pull the lever and save five people at the
cost of killing one person, or do you not do anything and allow five people to
die while one survives?
A consequentialist would without
a question argue that pulling the lever is the only morally acceptable thing to
do. Consequentialists do not consider doing harm to have intrinsic moral
significance, because the only thing that matters for them is the goodness of
the outcome, not the act itself. On the other hand, a deontologist would argue
that the distinction between doing and allowing harm does have intrinsic moral
significance. An absolute deontologist would claim that although by allowing
the harm more people will die, killing is worse than letting die, therefore not
pulling the lever would be the right thing to do. This doesn’t mean that the deontologist believes that allowing
harm is morally insignificant, but it simply has less moral weight than doing
harm does.
In her paper discussing the
trolley problem, Judith Thomson introduces an interesting additional normative
factor; claim. Let’s change the scenario just
slightly. What if the five people on the first track are workers that have been
promised their safety as part of their work contract, while the one person on
the second track just got stuck while aimlessly wondering. In this case, Thomson
would argue that the lever must be pulled, for the workers have more claim
against the trolley. According to Thomson, the normative factor of claim holds
more weight than the distinction between doing and allowing. However, although
this normative factor may apply to this specific scenario, it might not always
be applicable to the broader context of harm.
Now in discussing harm in a
broader context, I will introduce a normative factor that neither
consequentialists nor absolute deontologists acknowledge; intending harm.
Certainly, there is a notable distinction between doing harm, allowing harm and
intending harm. In scenarios like that of the trolley problem, there will
inevitably be both a positive and negative outcome. In this sense, since the
outcomes will be similar regardless of which act is performed, it’s questionable whether the distinction between doing
and allowing is really the only additional morally significant factor that
should be considered. Here it is appropriate to introduce the idea of the
intention of harm. Once this normative factor comes into the picture, the moral
permissibility of the act gains some more clarity. However it is still
important that we analyze the significance of different ways of intending harm.
This brings us to the “doctrine of double effect.”
The doctrine of double effect
defines an action that intends harm as an end or as a means to be morally
forbidden, but permits an action that causes harm as a foreseen byproduct of
the action. Let’s say you’re indefinitely trapped in the basement of an abandoned building with
your sister. It’s been 48 hours, and there is
nothing but a single slice of bread that is equally accessible to both you and
your sister. In scenario A, your sister eats the slice of bread. You get extremely
angry, and you strangle her to death. In scenario B, you strangle her to death
with the means of eating the bread yourself. In scenario C, rather than killing
your sister, you decide to eat the bread, which causes her to die from
starvation. Here we have a case where no matter what scenario, you are playing
a role in your sister’s death. How can we determine
which act is morally permissible?
According to the doctrine of
double effect, only scenario C is morally permissible. In scenario A you are
intending the death (harm) of your sister as your end goal, and in scenario B
you are intending the death of your sister as a means for the end goal of
eating the bread yourself. On the other hand, in scenario C, although you can
foresee that your sister will die from starvation, you do not intend her death
in any way; her death is simply a side effect of your action of eating the
bread.
Perhaps one of the most
interesting things about this case is that within the doctrine of double effect
we are able to observe the same outcome being produced by two scenarios where
the harm is done directly, and one where the harm is done indirectly. Although
the absolute deontologist would not label the action in scenario C to be
morally permissible, they would consider it to be more morally permissible than
the actions in scenarios A and B. Furthermore, the act in scenario C would even
be the preferable act for a consequentialist; the goodness of the outcome is
the highest out of all scenarios because you get to eat the bread without
dealing with the guilt of directly causing the death of your sister. If we are
ending up with the same conclusion regardless of which ethical approach we’re taking, are the additional moral factors we’ve analyzed truly morally significant?
I believe that intention has
high moral significance in the context of evaluating harm. In the absence of
intention, an individual should not be held morally responsible for their act
of harm, because although they physically performed the act that caused the harm,
they cannot be faulty for a negative outcome that they in no way anticipated or
desired. Along the same lines, I also believe that the doctrine of double
effect does not necessarily lead us to the correct evaluation of the harm that
has been done. Even if the harm is an unintentional byproduct of an action, I
don’t agree that the action can be morally permissible
if the harm is foreseeable. Let’s go back to
scenario C. This is not the same case of allowing harm as not pulling the lever
in the trolley problem, because after eating the bread I don’t have the means of saving my sister, therefore
rather than allowing her to die, I am a mere observer of her death. However, I
did at some point have the option of not eating the bread, and I always had the
knowledge that if I were to eat the bread, she would starve to death. In this
case, how different is my role in causing her harm in scenario C compared to
scenario B? Am I not causing the harm as a means of achieving the goal of my
survival in both scenarios? Is it really any more morally permissible for me to
cause the harm indirectly even though I am aware that the harm will be caused?
Does this awareness not indicate that the harm is a direct causation of my act?
It does. Therefore, unless the harm is an unforeseeable byproduct of an act, it
is not morally permissible in the context of the normative factor of intending
harm.
