Five views on killing the innocent

Here is a spectrum of views on killing the innocent to prevent worse evils:

1. Consequentialism: It is permissible to kill the innocent to prevent worse evils.

2. Threshold Deontology: It is permissible to kill the innocent to prevent much worse evils.

3. Standard Double Effect: It is permissible to perform an action foreseen to result in the death of an innocent to prevent worse evils when the death of the innocent is not intended.

4. Loose Carefulness: It is permissible to perform an action to prevent worse evils only when it is not likely that the action will result in the death of an innocent.

5. Strict Carefulness: It is permissible to perform an action to prevent worse evils only when there is no chance that the action will result in the death of an innocent.

In this post, my interest is in 3-4. But note that adherents of 2 may still be interested in 3-5, because they still need to have something to say about the cases which fall below the threshold of “much worse evils”.

Clearly, Strict Carefulness is too strict. On Strict Carefulness, it is wrong to drive anywhere, and in particular it is wrong to send a fire truck to rescue people from a burning building. In fact, we all the time perform actions that have a small chance of resulting in the death of the innocent.

I want to argue that if we reject Strict Carefulness, we should reject Loose Carefulness as well. The reason is that one gets a violation of Loose Carefulness by accumulating violations of Strict Carefulness. For instance, if one in a billion people vaccinated against some a deadly disease dies, then an adherent of Strict Carefulness will refuse to vaccinate anybody against that disease. That’s excessive carefulness. We should vaccinate (assuming the disease is sufficiently nasty and the vaccination is sufficiently effective, etc.). Nor does it cease to become permissible to vaccinate as the number of people vaccinated becomes sufficiently high that it it becomes likely that someone will die. Once it is granted that I may vaccinate one, clearly I may vaccinate a billion. Now, strictly speaking, that is not a counterexample to Loose Carefulness. For although those billion vaccinations are likely to result in the death of an innocent, they are not a single action that is likely to result in the death of an innocent. But that is easily fixed. Just imagine that I run a mega-clinic staffed with robotic nurses. I press a single button and a billion patients are vaccinated. Surely if it would be permissible for me to vaccinate them all one-by-one, it is permissible for me to dispatch the army of robotic nurses (assuming that they are just as effective, that they are not unduly scary to children, that all the same precautions are taken, etc.)

In other words, the adherent of Loose Carefulness who rejects (as everyone clearly should) Strict Carefulness has to make a dubious permissibility distinction between performing a single cumulative high-risk action and performing lots of separate low-risk actions.

Perhaps, though, someone could modify Loose Carefulness and replace “the death of an innocent” with “the death of a specific innocent”. In vaccinating a billion people, it seems there isn’t a specific innocent who is likely to die. I don’t think this modification is tenable. There are two different stories (and various combinations) one could tell about how the hypothetical vaccine kills one in a billion people. First, it could be that the vaccine interacts with the body of each in such a way that each individually has a one in a billion chance of death. Second, it could be that there is an undetectable condition (perhaps genetic) that occurs in one out of a billion people such that someone with that condition is nearly certain to die upon being vaccinated. I think it makes little moral difference which story is true. But on the second story, there is a specific innocent who will die when one vaccinates the billion people. Or consider Parfit’s story of releasing a lethal molecule into New York City which will kill one randomly person. That’s not significantly different from releasing a molecule into New York City that will kill one specific person.

So, neither Loose nor Strict Carefulness are right. That means that the choice we face is between Consequentialism, Threshold Deontology and Standard Double Effect, unless some other good options are found.