Doctrine of Doing and Allowing

Overview and Core Idea

The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) is a principle in normative ethics that claims a morally important difference between doing harm (actively causing or initiating a harmful outcome) and allowing harm (refraining from preventing a harm that would occur anyway). According to this doctrine, agents are subject to stronger moral constraints against doing harm than against allowing comparable harm, even when the bad outcomes and motivations are otherwise similar.

Supporters of the doctrine often appeal to intuitive judgements in everyday cases. For instance, many people judge it more seriously wrong to kill someone than merely to fail to save them, even when the agent could easily do so and the result (the person’s death) is the same. The doctrine attempts to systematize and justify this asymmetry.

DDA is closely related to, but distinct from, the Doctrine of Double Effect. Where the latter distinguishes intending harm from merely foreseeing harm, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing focuses on the agent’s role in bringing about or permitting harm: whether the agent is a causal initiator or a non-interferer.

Historical Background and Formulations

The underlying intuition behind the doctrine is widely thought to be present in common-sense morality, religious codes, and legal practice—for example, in the difference between crimes of commission and omission. However, in contemporary philosophy it has been discussed most explicitly by 20th-century analytic ethicists, including Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Warren Quinn, and others.

In modern discussions, the doctrine is often formulated in terms like:

• It is typically harder to justify doing harm than allowing equivalent harm.
• Positive duties (to help or rescue) are generally weaker or more limited than negative duties (not to harm).
• An agent has a special moral responsibility for outcomes that they cause, compared to outcomes they merely permit.

These formulations vary in strength. A strong version might say that doing harm is always worse than allowing the same harm, while more moderate versions allow exceptions but maintain that the doing–allowing distinction normally carries substantial weight in moral reasoning.

Defences of the Doctrine

Proponents offer several kinds of justification for treating doing and allowing differently:

1. Intuitive Case Comparisons

   Defenders marshal a range of thought experiments in which many people judge doing harm more harshly than allowing it, even under controlled conditions. For example:

   • Killing vs. letting die: Actively poisoning a person for gain seems worse than failing to send a life-saving antidote, though both lead to death.
   • Switch vs. bridge variants of trolley cases: Some argue that directly pushing a person to their death (doing harm) is more problematic than redirecting a threat one does not control, or refraining from intervening (allowing harm).

   On this view, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing codifies these widespread judgements.

2. Agency and Moral Space

   Some philosophers argue that agents have a special moral role as authors of changes in the world. To do harm is to use another person or their body as part of one’s own agential project, making one more deeply implicated in the resulting harm. Allowing harm, by contrast, involves leaving the world as it is, without incorporating another’s harm into one’s plan of action.

   This line of thought claims that personal agency and authorship generate stronger deontic constraints against doing harm than against failing to prevent it.

3. Rights and Permissions

   Another strategy locates the difference in the structure of rights. According to this view, individuals hold stringent rights not to be harmed, but their rights to be aided or rescued are typically weaker or more conditional. Negative rights (not to be interfered with) limit what others may do to them, while positive rights (to benefit) are more limited in scope.

   Thus, doing harm violates strong negative rights, whereas allowing harm may at most fail to realize weaker positive rights. This helps explain why moral rules, laws, and institutional norms often punish harmful acts more severely than failures to prevent harm.

4. Practical and Institutional Considerations

   Some defenders also appeal to the practical role of moral and legal rules. It is argued that robust prohibitions on doing harm:

   • Are more feasible to enforce than broad duties to prevent all preventable harm.
   • Provide clear, stable protections for individuals against being used as means for others’ purposes.
   • Avoid overburdening agents with extremely demanding obligations to constantly avert all harms they could prevent.

   On this more pragmatic reading, the DDA helps strike a balance between protecting individuals and preserving agents’ autonomy and life plans.

Criticisms and Ongoing Debates

The doctrine is highly controversial, especially among consequentialists, who often regard the distinction between doing and allowing as morally irrelevant when outcomes are held constant.

1. Outcome-Based Objections

   Critics argue that if morality is fundamentally about overall outcomes—for example, the minimization of suffering—then the route by which harm comes about (done vs. allowed) should not matter. If one could prevent a death at little cost and fails to do so, some claim this is morally on a par with causing that death.

   Thought experiments such as Singer’s drowning child (failing to save a child in a shallow pond) are used to pressure the view that allowing preventable harm can be equally wrong as doing it.

2. Manipulability of the Distinction

   Some philosophers contend that the doing/allowing line is unstable or manipulable. By rearranging descriptions of actions and omissions, one can cast a case as either doing or allowing. For instance:

   • Is turning off a life-support machine an act of killing (doing) or of letting die (allowing)?
   • Is failing to provide food to someone one has undertaken to care for an omission, or part of an ongoing harmful activity?

   If the line can be drawn in multiple plausible ways, critics worry that it cannot bear the moral weight defenders assign to it.

3. Moral Luck and Control

   Another critique concerns control and responsibility. In many cases, agents have substantial control over whether they allow a harm to happen. If moral responsibility tracks control, some argue that there is no obvious reason why omissions should be treated more leniently than actions, when agents are fully aware and capable of intervening.

4. Demandingness and Partial Acceptance

   Some philosophers accept that the distinction has some moral importance, but maintain that its role is less fundamental than defenders suggest. They might hold that:

   • Allowing serious harm through trivial inaction can be nearly as wrong as doing harm.
   • Institutions and social structures should treat systematic allowing of harm (for example, neglect of preventable diseases or poverty) as morally urgent, even if not identical to direct harm.

   This leads to hybrid views that give a modest role to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, while rejecting absolutist or blanket versions.

The ongoing debate about the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing intersects with larger controversies about deontological vs. consequentialist ethics, the nature of rights, and the analysis of action, omission, and agency. It remains a central topic in moral philosophy, especially in discussions of killing vs. letting die, medical ethics, and public policy.