David Turon

Doing harm and allowing harm are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in most instances in which one does harm, one also thereby allows harm. I argue that, on its own, doing harm (without allowing it) carries little or no moral weight—surprisingly, less moral weight than merely allowing harm. On the other hand, doing harm while allowing it is significantly harder to justify than merely allowing it. I argue that ordinary harm-doing is especially hard to justify because it involves a convergence of doing and allowing harm. I show that this higher threshold for justification is not simply the result of an additive effect; rather, there is a moral synergy between doing harm and allowing the same harm to the same victim. I conclude by offering two possible explanations for the synergy, helping us to better clarify and recast the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, as well as to determine its justification.

Some have argued that no analysis of counterfactual conditionals can succeed without appealing to causal notions. Such authors claim that, in determining what would transpire had some events gone differently, we hold fixed everything that is causally independent from those events. Call this view Causal Independence. Some have argued that we need Causal Independence to accommodate intuitive judgments about certain kinds of counterfactuals in indeterministic worlds. The aim of this paper is to show that, contra these authors, Causal Independence systematically delivers counterintuitive results for a certain subset of such counterfactuals-namely, those involving causation by double prevention. I conclude that intuitions about such counterfactuals do not motivate Causal Independence, at least in any form in which it has thus far been articulated. However, I suggest that a refined Causal Independence thesis that presupposes a kind of causal pluralism might be able to accommodate these intuitions, though such a refined version of Causal Independence may not conflict with reductive analyses of causal notions that appeal to counterfactuals after all.