Rachels on doing and allowing

Rachels famously gives us these two cases to argue that the doing–allowing distinction is morally vacuous:

1. You stand to inherit money from a young cousin, so you push them into a tub so they drown.

2. You stand to inherit money from a young cousin, and so when you see them drowning in a tub, you don’t pull them out.

The idea is that if there is a doing–allowing distinction, then (1) should be worse than (2), but they both seem equally wicked.

But it’s interesting to notice how things change if you change the reasons from profit to personal survival:

3. A malefactor informs you that if you don’t push the young cousin into the tub so they drown, you will be shot dead.

4. A malefactor informs you that if your currently drowning cousin survives, you will be shot dead.

It’s clear that it’s wrong to drown your cousin to save your life. But while it’s praiseworthy to rescue them at the expense of your life, unless you have a special obligation to them beyond cousinage, you don’t do wrong by failing to pull them out. And it seems that the relevant difference between (3) and (4) is precisely that between doing and allowing: you may not execute a drowning to save your life, but you may allow one.

Or consider this variant:

5. A malefactor informs you that if you don’t push the young cousin into the tub so they drown, two other cousins will be shot dead.

6. A malefactor informs you that if your currently drowning cousin survives, two other cousins will be short dead.

I take it that pretty much every non-consequentialist will agree that in (5) it’s wrong to drown your cousin, but everyone (consequentialist or not) will also say that in (6) it’s wrong to rescue your cousin.

So there is very good reason to think there is a morally relevant doing–allowing distinction, and cases similar to Rachels’ show it. At this point it is tempting to diagnose our intuitions about Rachels’ original case as based on the fact that the death of your cousin is not sufficiently good to justify allowing the drowning—their death is disproportionately bad for the benefit gained—so we want to blame the agent who cares about their financial good more than the life of their young cousin, an we don’t care whether they are actively or passively killing the cousin.

But things are more complicated. Consider this pair of cases:

7. Your recently retired cousin has left all their money to famine relief where it will save fifty lives but if your cousin survives another ten years their retirement savings will be largely spent and won’t be enough to save any lives. So you push the cousin into the tub to drown them.

8. Your recently retired cousin has left all their money to famine relief where it will save fifty lives but if your cousin survives another ten years their retirement savings will be largely spent and won’t be enough to save any lives. So when your cousin is drowning in the tub, you don’t rescue them.

Now it seems we have proportionality: your cousin’s death is not disproportionately bad given the benefit. Yet I have the strong intuition that it’s both wrong to drown them and to fail to save them. I can’t confidently put my finger on what is the relevant difference between (8), on the one hand, and (4) and (6), on the other hand.

But maybe it’s this. In (8), your rescue of your cousin isn’t a cause of the death of the people. The cause of their death is famine. It’s just that you have failed to prevent their death. On the other hand, in (4) and (6), if you rescue, you have caused your own death or the death of the two other cousins, admittedly by means of the malefactor’s wicked agency. In (8), rescuing blocks prevention of deaths; in (4) and (6), rescuring causes deaths. Blocking prevention is different from causing.

This is tricky, though. For drowning someone can be seen as blocking prevention of death. For their breathing prevents death and drowning blocks the breathing!

Maybe the difference lies between blocking a natural process of life-preservation (breathing, say) and blocking an artificial process of life-preservation (sending famine relief, say).

Or maybe I am mistaken about (4) and (6) being cases where rescue is not obligatory. Maybe in (4) and (6) rescue is obligatory, but it wouldn’t be if instead the malefactor told you that if you rescue, then the deadly consequences would follow. For maybe in (4) and (6), you are intending death, while in the modified cases, you are only intending non-rescue? I am somewhat sceptical.

There is a lot of hard stuff here, thus. But I think there is still enough clarity to see that there is a difference between doing and allowing in some cases.