Doctors are bound by the ethical requirement to first do no harm. Unfortunately, harm is not something that they can always avoid. Sometimes harm comes about through the actions of doctors, but at other times it comes about because of things they haven't done. David Molyneux is a doctor of medicine who is also working on a doctorate in philosophy, and his PhD thesis is about the difficult ethical questions that arise because of this distinction. Is there a moral difference between doing and allowing harm? But to answer this question, he first needed to get to grips with a prior question: when we allow harm do we thereby cause that harm? And more generally, do allowings, or omissions, cause?

Here are some introductory readings on the topic recommended by David:

Foot P (1984), Killing and Letting Die, in Steinbock and Norcross, Killing and Letting Die, Second Edition. pp 280-290.  New York: Fordham University Press.

McGrath S (2003) Causation and the Making/Allowing Distinction.   Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 114: 81-86

Woollard F (2012).    The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing I: Analysis of the Doing ⁄Allowing Distinction.   Philosophy Compass 7: 448–458 

Woollard, F and Howard-Snyder, F.  2021.  Doing and Allowing Harm.  The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 edition), Edward N Zalta (ed) URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/fall2021/entries/doing-allowing/   Accessed 15th January 2024.  

Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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