According to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the distinction between doing and allowing harm is morally significant. Doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. This paper is the first of a two paper critical overview of the literature on the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. In this paper, I consider the analysis of the distinction between doing and allowing harm. I explore some of the most prominent attempts to analyse this distinction:. Philippa Foot’s sequence account, Warren (...) Quinn’s action/ inaction account, and counterfactual test accounts put forward by Shelly Kagan and Jonathan Bennett. I also discuss Jeff McMahan’s account of the removal of barriers to harm. I argue that analysis of the distinction has often been made more difficult by two mistaken assumption: (1) the assumption that when an agent does or allows harm his behaviour makes the difference to whether or not the harm occurs (2) the assumption that the distinction between doing and allowing and the distinction between action and inaction are interchangeable. I suggest that Foot’s account is the most promising account of the doing/allowing distinction, but that it requires further development. (shrink)

I defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: the claim that doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. A thing does not genuinely belong to a person unless he has special authority over it. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing protects us against harmful imposition – against the actions or needs of another intruding on what is ours. This protection is necessary for something to genuinely belong to a person. The opponent of the Doctrine must claim that (...) nothing genuinely belongs to a person, even his own body. (shrink)

The article examines whether state officials may shoot down a hijacked airplane which carries uninvolved passengers, if it is known that the plane will be used against the lives of other human beings. In its first sections, it explains the German Federal Constitutional Court’s verdict against such a permission, and it scrutinizes the crucial arguments in this ruling. The author then extends the discussion beyond the path taken by the court. She examines the defensive claims of passengers aboard the plane (...) and the protective claims of potential victims who are present at the hijackers’ target zone. In contrast to the German Federal Constitutional Court, she concludes that state officials must take the claims of both groups of potential victims equally serious, and that such conditions allow applying a consequentialist calculus because it is the only way out of a genuine dilemma. (shrink)