Millions die every year in all parts of the world, many of them young children, as a direct or indirect result of extreme poverty. Modern relief agencies, such as CARE and UNICEF, have made it very easy for those of us who are even mildly affluent to save significant numbers of them. Most of us do very little to help. If we reject the belief that killing is worse than letting die, it is hard to see how we can judge our behavior as anything less than abominable. This clearly constitutes a powerful motivation, though not a respectable reason, to believe that the distinction between killing and letting die carries considerable moral weight. Though this does not itself constitute a decisive argument against the significance of the doing/allowing distinction, it should make us suspicious of our intuitive acceptance of it, especially in the absence of any good arguments in its favor. If there is no morally significant difference between killing and letting die in particular, and between doing and allowing in general, it is that much harder to justify our neglect of the underprivileged, both in our own country and abroad. We might well be forced to conclude that most of us who possess even modest resources are seriously at fault for not doing more to help others. This conclusion would certainly be painful. But we should not try to mask a self-interested attempt to avoid it with high-sounding talk of respect. The unpleasantness of a moral conclusion is not evidence for its falsity, or even for its unacceptability. If we have to choose between a position that is rationally ungrounded and one with painful implications, we should grit our teeth and choose the latter. By Alastair Norcross in Two Dogmas of Deontology: Aggregation, Rights, and the Separateness of Persons
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:14:36 +0000
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