Moral Responsibility for Unprevented Harm

FRIDERIK KLAMPFER University of Maribor

Moral Responsibility for Unprevented Harm That we are morally responsible for what we do willingly and knowingly is a commonplace. That our moral responsibility extends as far as to cover at least the intended consequences of our voluntary actions and perhaps also the ones we did not intend, but could or did foresee, is equally beyond dispute. But what about omissions? Are we, or can we be, (equally) morally responsible for the harm that has occured because we did not prevent it, even though we could have done so? Say, for all the enormous suffering, caused daily by famine, deprivation and curable diseases in the Third World countries? Moral intuitions and practices that one could consult in this matter seem to leave us in the dark. We regularly ascribe responsibility to people for harms resulting from their negligence or failure to fulfill professional duties. On the other hand, we tend to think that unless there is some evidence of the causal contribution that agents made to a harmful event and/or state, it is not really fair to blame it on them. And finally, to complicate things even more, most of us deny that omissions could effect anything (any change) in the world and consequently regard them as causally impotent (as well as possibly harmless). Most of the proposed solutions to this perplexing issue simply take negative moral responsibility for granted and then either try to revise our ordinary notion of causation accordingly or, alternatively, weaken the conditions for holding someone morally responsible. In the paper I present and defend the relative merits of the third approach, one sceptical of the notion of moral responsibility for the ‘outcomes’ of omissions. I try to show that for some identifiable core notion of moral responsibility and paradigmatic cases of omissions, the prospects for a happy marriage are rather slim. Keywords: moral and legal responsibility, causation, acts and omissions, causing and allowing harm .

“It is true that we feel ourselves under a greater obligation to help those whose misfortunes we have caused. On the other hand, any consequentialist (including myself) would insist that we are responsible for all the consequences of our actions, and if a consequence of my spending money on a luxury item is that someone dies, I am responsible for that death. It may be true that the person Acta Analytica, Volume 19 - Issue 33, 2004; pp. 119-161

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would have died even if I had never existed, but what is the relevance of that? The fact is that I do exist, and the consequentialist will say that our responsibilities derive from the world as it is, not as it might have been. ...The idea that we are directly responsible for those we kill, but not for those we do not help, depends on a questionable notion of responsibility.” (Singer 1993; 226, 228) »Singer presents the Prevention-Principle (the principle stating that we ought to prevent something very bad from happening, whenever it is in power to do so without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance – F.K.) in isolation from any other ethical principle. But, of course, there are other ethical principles, they also create obligations, and commitment to ethics involves commitment to these other principles and obligations. Here is, then, another principle, that reasonable and ethically committed people will accept: people should be held responsible for the easily foreseeable consequences of their voluntary actions. Let us call this the Responsibility-Principle. …If I decide to do something when nothing forces me, if I understand both the decision and the surrounding circumstances, and if a normally intelligent person could be expected to see that the action is likely to bring about certain specific results, then it is justified to praise or blame, reward or punish, approve or condemn me for the action. …One reason for rejecting even the weakened form of the Prevention-Principle that we have some obligation to alleviate the suffering of people in absolute poverty is that this supposed obligation is obviously affected by the Responsibility-Principle. It surely makes a difference to the obligation whether the people living in absolute poverty are responsible for their own suffering. If their suffering is an easily foreseeable consequence of their immoral or imprudent actions, then it is hard to see why other people would have an obligation to alleviate their plight rather than the plight of others who have not brought their suffering upon themselves. …Affluent people may have some obligation to alleviate the suffering of those who live in absolute poverty, provided the sufferers are not responsible for their own suffering.« (Kekes 2002; 511, 512) 1.

Introduction: setting the stage

That we are morally responsible for who we are, for what we think, for how we feel and for what we do, at least willingly and knowingly, is a commonplace. That our moral responsibility extends so far as to cover at least the intended consequences of our voluntary actions and perhaps also the ones we did not in-

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tend, but could or did foresee, is equally beyond dispute. But what about omissions? Are we, or can we be, (equally) morally responsible for harm that befell someone because we did not prevent it, even though we could have done so? To be more concrete, are we morally responsible for the enormous suffering and countless deaths, caused daily by famine, deprivation and curable diseases in the developing countries? In this paper I explore the prospects for a viable notion of negative/passive responsibility and offer a few prima facie reasons for its legitimate, though limited, use in moral reasoning. I will argue that omissions (refrainings, abstainings, allowings, failings to do something,...), despite their capacity to figure in true counterfactual conditionals, are ill-suited for the role of cause. Hence, if it were true that moral responsibility for some harm entails causal responsibility for it, there could be no moral responsibility for harm resulting from acts of omissions. The agents could at best be held directly responsible for a particular subset of their omissions – their deliberate refrainings from harm preventing course of action – which flow directly from their free decisions, deliberate choices and consciously formed intentions, but not also for what happens as a ‘result’ of such omissions.1 Are occasional, prima facie salient, ascriptions of moral responsibility for the consequences of omissions then to be understood metaphorically, as an indirect way of blaiming the agent for failing to do what clearly was, in the given circumstances, his duty? This possibility, or so I shall claim, is certainly worthy of consideration. If, on reflection, such a diagnosis turns out to be true, it will have serious implications for our practice of holding people responsible for their failure to prevent harm. The kind of responsibility-talk that is supposed to ground positive duties would then lack even its prima facie legitimacy in the context of moral relations of those well-off towards the poor. For, as an ongoing controversy about our duties to the poor shows, no normative back1

Any direct inference from established responsibility for an action to responsibility for its results or consequences is blocked by the possibility of the phenomenon of moral luck. If moral responsibility for X entails some (degree of) decisional or behavioral control over X, then we cannot be held morally responsible for those consequences of our actions that are beyond our control. If all of the consequences of our actions were a matter of luck (as some authors claim they are), then it would be wrong to hold people responsible for them and our notion of responsibility for consequences (but not also the notion of responsibility for, say, our thoughts, desires, intentions, decisions and voluntary actions) would find no application. For a statement and defense of control condition see Haji 1998, Zimmerman 1987 and Fischer & Ravizza 1991.

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ground of legitimate moral expectations that could go unfulfilled can be safely assumed here. Holding a person morally responsible for the death of an African child from starvation or curable disease, because instead of contributing to an aid agency she had bought a new stereo may be a rhetoricaly efficient way of affecting a change in her attitudes and behavior, but such a change comes at too high a theoretical price. The grounds of the duties of the governments of, and the individuals in, the absolutely wealthy countries to help the poor (assuming such duties) would then have to be sought elsewhere and not in their alleged moral responsibility for the harm they could have, but did not, prevent(ed). A short warning is appropriate. In the paper, I will be mainly concerned with the issue of moral responsibility of those leaving in absolute wealth for the predicaments of the absolutely poor.2 In order to resolve it, I will also occasionally address a more general issue of our moral responsibility for preventable, but unprevented harm. My qualified conclusions with regard to the former will not, however, pretend to apply to the latter, unless direct implications for the one can be derived from the other. Back to moral responsibility. The two quotations above illustrate the whole array of competing views on this complex issue. While Singer invokes moral responsibility for preventable harm in order to ground our positive moral duty to relieve the suffering of others that we ourselves did not cause, Kekes twistes the notion of moral responsibility for one’s own predicament around to cut ice the other way, reducing both the scope and the normative force of any such duty. Who is then right, Singer or Kekes? Is it our moral duty to prevent harm to other people and are we, as a result, morally responsible for it in case we fail to comply with our duty? Or are we primarily responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our own decisions and actions and so our duty to relieve the suffering of others diminishes in proportion to the extent they can be held responsible for (having brought) it (upon themselves)? Or are they perhaps both

2 The issue of our duties to the poor can be cast in different terms: some try to derive them from the rights of the poor, others from some general moral principle, such as the principle of beneficience or the principle of harm-prevention (like Singer) or the principle of just compensation, some by reference to what a (self-declared) minimally morally decent person presumably would do about poverty, and still others in terms of what a morally responsible person (i.e. a person who does not shy away from responsibility) would do (LaFollette & May 1996). One of the points I am going to make is that the dispute about what we owe to the poor is ill-served by casting it in terms of our retrospective moral responsibility for their suffering.

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wrong and the truth about our duties with respect to, and our responsibility for, the harm lies somewhere inbetween? Singer’s reasoning in the opening paragraph is, to put it mildly, rather messy. He starts by admitting that we do feel more obliged to help if we have caused someone to be in need of (our) help, but quickly adds that we are equally responsible for all of the consequences of our actions, some of which are simply those states of affairs or events that would not have occurred if we had done the thing that would have prevented them. Furthermore, even though, in the light of Singer’s preceding remark, one would expect an example of an omission of action that the agent is nevertheless responsible for, Singer’s treatment of the case of a stereo purchase seem to suggest that it is this action that causes someone to die, rather than the failure to make a life-saving donation instead. Such a “solution” avoids the problem of causal impotence of omissions, but only at the cost of running into an even more serious one of explaining the alleged causal link between my purchase of a stereo and the death of a person thousands of miles away.3 The denial of the equivalence thesis may depend on the questionable notion of responsibility, but Singer’s argument for the same thesis depends on an even more puzzling notion of causation. Singer’s confused treatment of the topic is no surprise. Our practice of ascribing responsibility abounds by hard cases each raising a number of perplexing philosophical issues. The following is a random and an incomplete selection: responsibility for our role in collective as opposed to individual wrongdoing (when wrongdoing, say oppresion against women or a racial or ethnic minority, occurs at the level of social practice the social acceptance of which impedes the individual’s awareness of wrongdoing (Calhoun 1989); moral responsibility for harm (say, those violations of rights) which occurs as a result of our actions vs. moral responsibility for harm that is a necessary consequence of adopting what we know to be a harmful policy;4 moral 3

The victim may just as well be around the corner. For as long as we lack an exact method of specifying the particular victim of my purchase, we have to assume causal links between my purchase of a stereo and the death of every person who died within a certain period of time after my purchase of some cause that my donation could have prevented from having its lethal effect. 4 Is there any moral difference between deliberately punishing an innocent person and adopting a policy which we know will inevitably lead to some innocent persons being punished? Or between selling someone a second-hand car that we now presents a safety-risk, and deciding not to call for repair thousands of cars after discovering a mechanical defect that may

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responsibility for so-called imperceptible harms (what’s the force of the “what if everyone did that?” objection?); shared responsibility (corporate moral and legal responsibility, moral responsibility for war crimes, moral responsibility for discriminative, opressive, exploitative,... social practices and institutions); moral reponsibility for preventable, but unprevented harms (the ‘consequences’ of omissions); moral responsibility for other people’s needs (Boonin-Vail 1997, Prijić 1997, LaFollette & May 1996); moral responsibility for emotions and/or their particular manifestations (Sherman 1999); moral responsibility for character traits (Audi 1991); moral responsibility of drug addicts and persons suffering from different kinds of compulsive behavior disorders (Yaffe 2001 and Stocker 1999); responsibility for (some of) the thoughts of our dream selves (Haji 1998); moral responsibility for unpredicted consequences of our actions; moral responsibility for imposed risks, and so on.5 Suppose one is basicaly sympathetic to attempts to establish some kind of prima facie obligation to help the poor (as I am). Suppose one agrees that not saving the lives of the poor that we could save at low cost and no risk to ourselves is not only calous or selfish, but also seriously wrong. Still, one may wonder, why would one want to explain its wrongness in terms of our moral responsibility for their death and not use some other, less controversial route instead? This question is especially pressing with respect to Singer’s influential treatment of the topic which seems to make only peripheral use of the notion of moral responsibility. 2.

Clearing up the conceptual mess

Are people morally responsible for harm they did not cause or brought about themselves, but merely failed to prevent? Is it right to hold them morally responsible not just for their thoughts/beliefs, desires, intentions, decisions, actions and their outcomes, but also for the ‘consequences’ of their ‘acts’ of omission? Before we even begin to answer this tricky question, we need to clarify basic notions. Hardly any other moral question is permeated by so many deeply pose a safety-risk? And if so, where should it manifest itself: in judgments about rightness, about moral worth of decisions and actions, about the agent’s character,...? 5 Is it realistic to look for a single notion of moral responsibility that is broad enough to encompass all these cases? I answer this pressing question indirectly in sections 5 and 6.

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ambigious and essentially contested terms. What exactly do we mean by »responsibility«, »harm«, »cause«, »consequence«, »action« and »omission«? Let’s start with »responsibility«. Ascriptions of moral responsibility serve a variety of purposes in a host of different contexts. Sometimes when trying to aportion responsibility we are really after authorship (“whodunnit?”). At other times our goal is to determine the appropriate sanction or reward; or to establish potential duties of reparation or restitution; or even just to make the agent feel bad about himself for having done something we dislike or resent. To compound the mess, ascriptions of responsibility sometimes serve as a ground for statements about someone’s obligations towards others.6 More often, though, responsibility ascriptions ground claims about someone’s accountability or answerability for her behavior.7 This variety of purposes and meanings of »responsibility« is reflected in a rich vocabulary we employ when we try to allocate moral responsibility in the broad sense of the word: we hold agents accountable, blameable, culpable, liable, appraisable, reprehensible, deserving of praise or reproach,… for something they have done or failed to do. Provisionaly, I will take the expression “A is morally responsible for h” to mean “A is blameable for h”, “It is prima facie appropriate/right for A to feel guilty about h”, »A deserves scorn, reproach, and the like for his part in the production of h«. In the last chapter, I will introduce some necessary distinctions into this notion and show that just by attending to its many strains we can account for many, if not all, different intuitive judgments. Next, take the word »omission«. What is an omission, what constitutes it? Well, for a start, an omission of action X is literally the absence of any instance of action-type X, so, in a sense, no thing at all. (Moore 1999; 23) Still, when we say of someone that she omitted to make a donation, what we mean is more than just »She did not make a donation«. Otherwise we would have to admit that besides typing these letters on the computer (which, admittedly, is an action of mine) I am also at the same time (consciously or not) omitting millions 6 I am responsible for the provision of my baby’s – and possibly certain other people’s – needs in the sense that I ought to attend to, or take care of, them. This is how LaFollette & May 1996 use the term. 7 The former are usually called »prospective« or “forward-looking responsibilities” and distinguished from the so-called »retrospective« or »backward-looking responsibilities«. (Richardson 1999) In the paper, I will be primarily concerned with the latter and, unless otherwise indicated, I will use the word »responsibility« to mean »responsibilities for those events and outcomes that can be retrospectively ascribed to me as an agent«.

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of other actions (I’m not swimming, jogging, taking a shower, sleeping, and so on indefinitely). So it must take more for something to qualify as an omission of action than the mere fact that someone did not do it. Different authors (see Moore 1979, Milanich 1985 propose different ways of supplementing the absence of action in their accounts of necessary conditions for omission: with the ability to do the action in question, awareness of the possibility of agency and/ or formation of intention to forego it. Hence, in order for an agent to omit some action s, it must first of all be true that the agent could perform this action, but didn’t; some authors then add, as a sort of minimal requirement, awareness of both the possibility to perform it and the fact that she’s forgone it, while others insist on a more demanding condition, namely that the agent has decided not to perform it and eventually didn’t perform it because of such a decision. Given the enormous variety of forms or types of omissions (refrainings, abstainings, failings, forebearance, and so on) as well as their almost intractable interdependence,8 however, it may be naive to expect that any single account will work equally well for all of them. For the purposes of this article I will therefore simply adopt Smith’s (Smith 1990) taxonomy of omissions. Smith divides the class of omissions (i.e. instances of allowing something to happen, or letting it happen) into two main categories, conscious and unconscious omissions. We can let h happen either by refraining from doing that which would prevent it from occurring, or by 8

The various categories are not merely interrelated, they also form a certain hierarchy in the sense that some types of omissions are accomplished by other types of omissions. The category of allowing harm or letting it happen (omitting) is basic and the other two, failing and refraining, are just modes of allowing: we allow things to happen either by failing to prevent them or by refraining from doing that which would prevent them. We can, however, fail to prevent harm in various ways: we can abstain from performing the preventory action (i.e. consciously omit it), we can fail in our attempt to perform it, or we can simply do something else instead which precludes us from doing the thing in question. Failing thus does not imply doing something (else instead) and neither does refraining - even though we sometimes allow harm to occur by doing something which prevents us from doing the thing that could prevent it, some omissions involve no actions. (Milanich 1984) And this is important for one may feel tempted to resolve the puzzle of negative responsibility by simply assuming that there are no basic nonactions (that we always allow harm by either refraining or failing and that both are necessarily accomplished by way of doing something else instead). To be sure, this line of argumentation would soon reach a dead end anyway, as Singer’s example shows. It makes little sense to contend that not my omission of the life-saving donation, but my purchase of a new stereo caused that African child to die. The substitute action makes an even less plausible candidate for the role of a cause of her death than the original omission as I will argue shortly.

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failing to intervene. The former is the principal mode of conscious omissions (we refrain from an action when our inaction is properly connected to an appropriate conscious mental episode, either a belief or an intention, of ours), the latter of unconscious ones (we fail to do something when by not acting we betray certain reasonable expectations). Let me illustrate this. If I am aware both of the suffering of African children and of my capacity to end or alleviate at least some portion of it, but for hedonistic reasons decide not to do anything about it, then I have omitted a life-saving action by refraining from it. If, on the other hand, I am unaware of either of these facts (or at least the latter) and never even contemplate the possibility of helping them, then I have unconsciously omitted a life-saving action by failing to make a donation, provided it is reasonable, given social norms, to expect such a donation from me.9 Do the differences between these sub-classes of omissions matter morally? Does it make a difference whether the child died because we have refrained from making a life-saving donation (because after contemplating that option we decided not to pursue it), or because we have failed to make it due to the (culpable or not) lack of attendance to, or care for, her plight? In the concluding section I will argue that with respect to the only kind of moral responsibility that non-donors can plausibly be ascribed, this difference may not matter as much as one might think. But before that let me briefly tackle the remaining two notions, the notion of a consequence and the notion of harm. First, when does some event or state of affairs rightly count as a consequence of something we did or failed to do? Well, we obviously cannot answer the question about the consequences without first settling the more basic and substantial issue of causation: When can one

9 This account puts both negligent and reckless behavior (a failure to take reasonable precautions against risks of harm, either due to the lack of attendance or foresight, or because of the lack of due care) into the category of unconsciuos omissions. A person, however, can surely be negligent or reckless both in her actions and omissions. But if so, how can then, one may wonder, negligent and reckless actions be forms of omission? This is not a seriuos objection against Smith’s account, though. One way to omit a particular action is by means of performing another action that prevents us from performing the first. Although this may or may not always be the case with negligent and reckless actions, it shows that omissions and actions are not mutually exclusive. What is ruled out is simultaneous performance and omission of one and the same (type of) action, for instance, an action that both prevents h from happening and at the same time lets h happen.

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event or state of affairs be said to cause another event or state of affairs? I will therefore leave this question for later.10 How about harm? When is an event or state of affairs harmful to someone? When does one person harm another? What kind of things can be harmed and in what ways? Rather than getting lost in a labyrinth of competing answers to these and other questions, I will extract what I take to be the common ground in rival accounts of harm. Harm is clearly related to constituents of our wellbeing or welfare, that is with those things that affect our lives to the better or to the worse: our plans, projects, desires, interests, ideals, relationships. According to this picture, an event, h, is harmful to A iff, as a result of h, A is either worse off than he would have been had h not occured (Feinberg 1970), or if he finds himself in an objectively harmful condition, one in which he is disabled or suffering in some way or in which his interests or rights are frustrated (Harris 1992), or if his most important interests are thwarted, defeated or set back (Beauchamp & Childress 1994; 193). On all these accounts, then, when we are harmed, our life undergoes some change. 3.

The paradox of moral responsibility for unprevented harm stated

The idea that besides the harm we intentionally or unintentionally cause, we can also be morally responsible for the harm we fail to prevent, is coherent enough, when considered on its own. Once combined it with certain other moral and metaphysical views we are likely to hold, however, the tensions inherent in our

10

Tännsjö (1982) proposes the following analysis of when something is a consequence of some action: The event, h, is a consequence of the action, a, iff there is some explanation of some feature of h which contains some true description of a; it is not the case that h would have occured no matter what the agent had done instead of performing a; and a precedes h temporally. I find this »explanatory account« of the consequences of our conduct quite neutral, at least initially. It does not rule out, by definition, the possibility of omissions having consequences. The first two conditions are formulated broadly enough to encompass the idea of omissions as potential concrete particulars that can produce concrete events, that is, have consequences. The third one simply introduces a general and, as far as I can tell, uncontroversial constraint on the correct chronological order of causes and effects. However, even though ‘consequences’ of omissions are not ruled out by definition, there are specific problems with the requirement of the right temporal order that omissions face, but actions don’t. I discuss it at length below.

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belief system quickly surface. The riddle, or the paradox, of moral responsibility for unprevented harm consists in the following inconsistent triad: (i)

There can be no moral responsibility for harm without causal responsibility for it. (»causality condition«)11 or (i*) Whenever the agent is morally responsible for some harm, she is morally responsible for it in virtue of causing that harm. (»moral implies causal«) (ii) Omissions cannot cause (or causally contribute) anything, including harm. (“causal impotence of omissions”) (iii) At least sometimes, we are morally responsible for the harm we fail to prevent. (»passive/negative responsibility«) (iii*) At least sometimes, if not always, we are equally morally responsible for the harm we fail to prevent and the harm we directly cause. (“equivalence”) Let me first provide some missing background. Although (i) may not strike everyone as self-evident, it is nevertheless backed up by two powerful considerations. First of all, in the ordinary context of moral deliberation we tend to require some evidence of authorship (causal contribution), before we are ready to blame the resulting harm on a particular agent. We treat »I had nothing to do with it!« as a perfectly valid excuse and justifiably refuse to scorn, blame or resent people for doings they had no personal share in. It is simply part of our ordinary notion of responsibility, that if we are responsible for anything that happens at all, it must be in virtue of the things we do (or perhaps omit to do). (Audi 1991) This finds resonance in both legal theory and practice, which seem to tie liability and causation closely together. From the point of view of torts and contracts, we are each liable only for those harms we have caused by ac11

The causality condition is at least an uncontroversial part of our common-sensical view on the moral responsibility for actions: “If you are morally responsible for your action then you must have played a role in causing your action and the action must have been done freely. I take this claim to be widely accepted, if not self-evident.” (Rowe 1991; 237, my emphasis) Few would object to making it a necessary condition for moral responsibility for the consequences of our actions as well: »Moral responsibility entails causal responsibility. Roughly, a person is causally responsible for a consequence just in case he acts, or fails to act, in such a way as to make it obtain. He is morally responsible for a consequence if he causes it to obtain, it involves benefit or harm to others, and it generates a normative judgment about how he ought to have acted in the circumstances in which it obtains.« (Glannon 1997; 227)

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tions that breach our legal duties. The causal element also plays a central role in criminal liability. Sometimes it is explicit (as when a legal statute makes »any act that causes abuse to the child« punishable), but more often it is implicit (as when the law prohibits killings, maimings, rapings, burnings, and so on, meaning by that actions that cause death, disfigurement, penetration, fire damage and the like.) (Moore 1999; 1)12 (ii) may strike the reader as either trivial or a straw-man or both. What’s the point of arguing for the harmlessness of omissions on the basis that since they are causally impotent altogether, they must also be causally impotent with respect to harms? Isn’t this implication so obvious that no sane person would want to deny it? But if both parties to the dispute agree that we can only cause harm through actions, whereas omissions of actions merely allow it, what purpose could stating such an obvious truth possibly serve? What the friend of the negative/passive responsibility owes us instead, one could insist, is good reasons for holding people morally responsible for the harm they merely allow, but don’t cause, that is to say, for outcomes not just of their primary, but also of secondary agency. Such a complaint is too hasty, though. First of all, some authors acknowledge a special type of causation, so-called causation by omission. If we can cause things to happen by means of omitting actions, however, then it must be, at least in principle, possible for omissions to cause harms as well. Another reason for stating ‘the trivial’ is that it may not be so trivial after all. The distinction between acts and omissions, or between harming and merely allowing harm, is very much part of our everyday moral vocabulary – but also notoriously difficult to draw. The most popular view casts it in causal terms 12

The conditions that the law lists for criminal or tort liability for our comissions and omissions cannot settle the dispute about negative/passive moral responsibility, of course. There are good reasons for believing that whatever the former, criteria for determining negative moral responsibility should be somewhat less strict or demanding. Enacting “bad samaritan laws”, that is laws that oblige persons, on pain of criminal punishment, to provide easy rescues and other acts of aid for persons in grave peril, within a liberal legal system, may bring high moral and theoretical costs with it. This fact provides a compelling reason against forcing, by legal means, people to fulfil their positive duties, or legally sanctioning their failure to do so, without at the same time constituting a compelling moral reason against other types of incentives and/or deterents, such as public approval or condemnation or appropriate educational measures. (Malm 1995) Nevertheless, conditions for criminal liability and moral responsibility for omissions have one more thing in common. The “minimal effort and risk restriction« that is a necessary component of any acceptable bad samaritan statute, should be equally incorporated into every plausible account of moral responsibility for unprevented harm.

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– when we harm a person, it is in virtue of our actions causing harm to her, when we merely allow harm, nothing we do causally contributes to her being harmed. This account of the distinction between (harmful) acts and omissions has recently been called into question, however, for its failure to accommodate a particular class of harmful acts, namely creating dangers. One prominent way to harm a person is by imposing risk on, or creating danger for, her. This can be accomplished either by doing something (to borrow an example from Bennett 1995, we may put people in danger by removing a warning sign), or by failing to do something (we may put people in danger by not putting up a warning sign). The problem, however, is that since danger or risk is a probabilistic state of affairs, neither of the two can be causally related to it. A great deal of risk-making, including much of what morally matters, must therefore be noncausal, regardless of the means by which we create it. (ibid.; 127) As for (iii), many authors (Mellor 1995, Smith 1990, McGrath 2003) simply take responsibility for the consequences of omissions for granted, and then either treat it as evidence that since omissions, not being event-particulars, cannot cause anything, moral responsibility does not entail causal responsibility, or that fact-causation, in virtue of its potential to account for negative/passive responsibility, is clearly superior to event-causation. Another, less obvious and economical way out of trilemma is suggested by Sartorio (2004). Whether one happens to be sympathetic to the idea of causation by omission and would therefore want to reject (ii) or not, we should find (i) and (i*) implausible in their own light. There are independent reasons for rejecting (i), she claims, so we should reject it regardless of our view on the truth of (ii). What are these compelling reasons? Well, (i) or (i*) cannot accommodate counterexamples such as Two Buttons, where we are undeniably responsible for something that none of our actions or omissions caused. We are then left with the following puzzle. If we are sometimes responsible for things other than those that we – by way of our actions and/or omissions – cause, then our responsibility for harm cannot (always) lie in the fact that we caused it. Are these two notions then completely unrelated? No. When I am responsible for something I did not cause myself, it must be, according to Sartorio, because I am responsible for its cause. In Two Buttons, for example, I am responsible for the explosion in virtue of the fact that my and my colleague’s failure to depress the two buttons caused the explosion, and that I was responsible for (my part of) that failure. In general, she proposes to replace Moral Entails Causal with Causal Transmits Moral,

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which reads as follows: If an agent is responsible for an outcome, then it is in virtue of the fact that the agent is responsible for something that caused that outcome, be it an action or an omission of his. So in the end, the rejection of (i) does depend on the rejection of (ii) after all. Besides, she owes us an argument for the claim that it was our joint failure to depress the two buttons that caused the explosion rather than the more natural candidate, namely the original leakage of the chemical. And finally, the revision of (i) she advocates does not amount to much. What we get, as a necessary condition on moral responsibility for an outcome, is responsibility for one of its causes instead of causation. This improvement on the original condition won’t make much difference in most of the contexts of responsibility ascription, except for those where the only way to produce some outcome is by a combined effort of several persons. For in that case (and that case alone) we can share responsibility for the cause of an outcome that is not identical to any (set) of our actions or omissions, one we did not cause. Such a shift makes little or no difference to Singer’s case, however, unless one would want to argue that by purchasing the stereo we somehow make ourselves responsible for the cause of the death of that African child – which would only be plausible on a bold and clearly unwarranted assumption that it was the collective failure of all those in the position to make a life-saving donation that eventually killed her.13 Finally, on the face of it, (iii*), the thesis of equivalence, is clearly more difficult to defend than (iii), its negative/pasive responsibility variant. In general, our attitudes towards harm are regulated by two moral constraints, one prohibiting doing harm and the other prohibiting allowing it (when one can prevent it). Now, though we tend to feel more strongly bound by the former (in the sense that we both judge its violation more wrong and find the agent more culpable for it, other things being equal) than the latter, we nevertheless find preventing harm morally important – just not quite as important as refraining from causing it ourselves. (Kagan 1998; 70ff) Our asymmetric attitudes to the way harm is brought about seem to be replicated in the way we allocate moral responsibility for it. Most of us don’t completely shy away from responsibility for the harm that we occasionaly fail to prevent, but nevertheless want to preserve the idea that we are primarily responsible for (the outcomes of) what 13

It is difficult enough to show how I could have killed her by omitting the donation, let alone how omissions of millions of people similarly placed did it together.

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we do or bring into the world and only secondarily for (the outcomes of) what we omit to do or fail to prevent from obtaining. Or, to borrow a useful phrase from Scheffler (2004), we accept responsibility more readily in case of primary manifestation of our agency (i.e. our actions) than in case of its secondary manifestation (i.e. our inactions). This is how we try to resolve a tension between our dual causal positions: for we both initiate causal chains and also intervene into those causal processes that we did not initiate and that may even be quite alien to our purposes. Accordingly, we don’t just hold each other accountable for the disastrous chains of events that we have initiated or causally contributed to, but also for our response to causal opportunities that derive from our personal position in the causal order. Still, Singer has numerous allies in embracing either the equivalence thesis or its more moderate cousin, the negative responsibility thesis. James Rachels (Rachels 1997), for example, finds Smith and Jones equally responsible (blameable) for the death of their nephew, even though the former has drowned him, while the latter merely failed to come to rescue. Even though he clearly subscribes to the equality thesis, he is a bit more cautious in phrasing it: letting someone die, he says, can sometimes be just as wrong as directly killing him. Nevertheless, he does occasionally slip into the responsibility talk: for example, he acknowledges that the way active and passive euthanasia may sometimes differ morally is in their respective consequences (ibid.; 68); he ridicules the attempt, in AMA statement on mercy killing, to deny that by deliberately ceaseing medical treatment we intentionally terminate the patient’s life (ibid.; 66) (“terminate” being an active verb); he obviously takes the question as to whether killing and letting die as such are equally morally wrong as interchangeable with the question of whether they are equally reprehensible and the respective agents equally to blame for them. Despite this, however, he does suggest two interesting alternative lines of thinking about moral responsibility. First of all, he clearly denies that the doctor, when he simply stops treating the patient, doesn’t do anything to bring about his death, as opposed to doing something when he kills the patient, for, as he puts it, “the doctor does one thing that is very important: he lets the patient die” (ibid.; 67); hence he treats omissions as literally a (n admittedly slightly different) subclass of actions (the difference being that omissions are the kind of actions that one can perform by way of not performing certain other actions - “one may let the patient die, for example, by not giving medication, just as one may insult someone by not

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shaking his hand” (ibid.). Still, this does not commit him to the view that omissions have causal powers. For, as he says, we are justified in treating omissions as a type of action “for the purpose of moral assessment... the decision to let a patient die is subject to moral appraisal in the same way that a decision to kill would be subject to moral appraisal; it may be assessed as wise or unwise, compassionate or sadistic, right or wrong” and the agent (the doctor) may be legitimately blamed for it or brought charges against. And this fits well with my explanation that we can be held morally responsible (guilty, blameable, reprehensible, accountable) for some of our omissions (typically refrainings), even though there is no basis for the ascription of moral responsibility for their ‘consequences’ (deaths and other forms of unprevented harm). Then there is an influential Jewish tradition of treating refrainings from multiplying as equivalent to murder, both being the intentional bringing about of the state of affairs ‘human beings that would otherwise have existed, don’t exist’. “Whoever renounces marriage violates the commandment of humans to multiply and is to be considered a murderer, for he diminishes the number of beings created in God’s image.” (rabbi Eleasar ben Asar); “The one who does not multiply is like the one who sheds blood.” (rabbi Eliezer). And, last but not least, John Harris (1986) treats the two basic ways of affecting the world, the positive and the negative, as being morally on a par. The strangest formulation of the equivalence thesis is advanced (but not really defended) by Oderberg (2000). If we take his expression »equally culpable« to mean »equally deserving of reactive attitudes such as blame, condemnation, scorn, resentment, punishment«, we can summarize it as follows. There is such a thing as killing (bringing about someone’s death) by omission; not all omissions can bring about death, but some can and do; and the difference between the harmless and the lethal ones lies in the fact that the former constitute a violation of some prior duty to act, while the latter don’t. Hence, whenever I have a duty to do something and I don’t comply with it and then someone dies (as a ‘result’ of this), I have killed that person by omission. So if I interpreted Oderberg’s scarce remarks correctly, the fact that by omitting (to do) something I have violated some prior duty to act, matters more to the classification of my behavior than to its moral evaluation. Rather than being morally relevant, it helps us set what looks like a purely factual dispute, namely whether I have killed (i.e. brought about the death of) that person or not. Such an account certainly has a feel of absurdity about it. First of all, the ordinary

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word »killing« is undeniably a causative action verb and as such, even though it may not mean »causing death«, it must at least imply it! (see Lowe 2002; 198) But then surely whether we should classify what I did as killing or not, must depend entirely on whether I brought someone’s death about or not, not on the relation my conduct bears to moral precepts applicable in the situation. Besides, consider the absurd epistemological implications of Oderberg’s account for hard cases such as Singer’s. Did I kill the African child (bring her death about) by failing to make a donation or not? Well, that will depend on whether I was morally obliged to donate (save her) or not.14 As long as the jury is still out there (as it seems to be), no definite answer can be given to this deceptively simple question. Do we really have to wait for a moral verdict in order to find out what we did? 4.

Ways out of the trap

Not everybody finds the equivalence thesis so intuitive, though. After presenting the case of Jim and the captured and to-be-exemplary-executed Indians, Bernard Williams (Williams 1973) argues at length that holding Jim responsible for the death of all 20 Indians in case he refuses to kill one himself instead overlooks the important fact that each of us is first of all responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, treats moral agents as executors of a satisfaction system who happen to be at a particular point at a particular time and whose decisions are entirely determined by all the satisfactions which they can affect from where they are, i.e. by the projects of others and not their own, either positively or negatively. If agents within the causal field of their decision have projects which are at any 14

Contrast this with Patricia Smith’s account of unconscious omissions in terms of unmet reasonable expectations which bears some superficial resemblance with Oderberg’s. Smith treats unmet legitimate expectations as a defining feature of omissions, however, not of their causal power. The difference is important – on her account the answer to the above question determines whether the agent, despite the lack of an otherwise necessary conscious element (formed intention to refrain or/and an awareness of the option foregone), omitted a life-saving donation or not, not whether his omission has killed the African child or not. Finally, even though Singer could be interpreted as trying to tie our moral responsibility for the child’s death to our violation of the duty to help save her life, the two are in fact mutually independent – the fact that we are morally responsible for her death simply in virtue of not preventing it where we could is not so much an implication of a violation of duty as independent evidence for it.

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rate harmless, they should be assisted, if their projects are harmful, as it is true of captain Pedro’s, they should be frustrated. The undesirable projects of others determine the agent’s decisions negatively, the desirable ones positively. If Pedro was not there or had different projects, the causal nexus of Jim’s decision would be different. Such moral deliberation/reasoning, however, is clearly hostile to the value of integrity, which is upheld as long as each agent is free to pursue his own deepest personal commitments. What underlies the common distinction between positive and negative responsibility, one might then say, following Williams’ complaint, is some fundamental asymmetry between responsibility for the outcomes of our own decisions and actions and responsibility for the outcomes of the decisions and actions of others. Even if this inutition is correct and Williams’ discussion provides a good prima facie reason for rejecting the equivalence thesis (and my impression is that it does), however, it does not directly undermine the negative responsibility thesis. For it may well be true that we are, in general, more responsible (culpable, blameable) for the harm we cause than the one we merely allow to happen, yet nevertheless bear at least some moral responsibility for the latter as well. We need a more compelling reason for rejecting (iii) then. Here is one a bit more promising attempt. 4.1.

A simple(-minded) argument in favor of the harmlesness of omissions

The foe of (iii) could try to establish the harmlessness of omissions on the basis of their causal impotence by way of the following simple(-minded) argument. (1)

Nothing but an event-particular can cause anything in the world to exist or change. Omissions of actions are not event-particulars in the world.15

(2) Hence (3)

Omissions of actions cannot genuinely16 cause anything in the world to exist, cease to exist or change. 15

See Thomson (1977; 212): “It seems to me that there are no acts of omission.” and Moore (1997; 23): »Omissions are literally no things at all. …A’s omission to save V is literally the absence of any action of saving V by A.« 16 Omissions, so Dowe (2001), are not cases of genuine, but quasi-causation. Accordingly, claims about ‘causation by omission’, when they struck us as true (and some do), should be understood as counterfactual claims about genuine causation, rather than direct claims about the latter.

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An event, h, harms A iff, as a result of h, A is worse off than he would have been had h not occured (Feinberg 1970) or if he finds himself in a harmful condition, that is one in which he is disabled or suffering in some way or in which his interests or rights are frustrated (Harris 1992), or if his interests are thwarted, defeated or set back (Beauchamp & Childress 1994; 193) In order for someone to be made worse off or put in a harmful initial condition, something must be either caused to exist or change in the world. (Harm implies a change, typically in someone’s well-being.)

(5)

Hence (from 3 and 5) (6) Hence (ii)

Omissions can neither make anyone worse off than he would have been otherwise nor put anyone in a harmful condition nor thwart, defeat or set back his interests. Omissions of actions cannot harm anyone.

The above argument is meant to establish the principled harmlessness of omissions in virtue of their causal impotence, so that acts of omissions (even if culpable) could never provide a legitimate ground for the ascription of moral responsibility for a given outcome. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes a particular (and for many highly controversial) view of causation, according to which causation relates only event-particulars. But surely both our ordinary talk and thought about human agency and our existing legal practice uphold other candidates for the role of causal relata. We sometimes identify individual things or substances (such as persons or agents) as causes of events (as in »Adam broke the window.«), whereas at other times we ascribe this role to facts or states of affairs (as in »The window broke because Adam kicked the football in.«) Hence unless I can show that the truth of (3) can be disentangled from the truth of (1),17 my argument will collapse under the simple but effective 17

In trying to undermine (2), the claim that omissions are non-existent entities (»no things at all«) and as such ill-suited for the role of cause, the friend of negative/passive responsibility could draw the ‘nihilist’s’ attention to the fact that, after all, we do treat both acts and omissions as objects of moral judgments. And he could support this with the following familiar metaphysical picture underlying our ordinary moral judgments. Every act-token has a moral status (forbidden, permitted, perfectly obligatory, imperfectly obligatory, merely permitted,

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charge of theoretical bias. Let me therefore quickly review the most popular theories of causation from the point of view of whether they grant or withold causal potency to omissions of actions.18 4.2.

Are omissions really causally impotent?

(RTC) the regularity theory of causation (also labeled Humean or Neo-Humean) holds »c is the/a cause of e« to mean »both c and e occured, c preceded e temporarily, c is an instance of event-type C and e is an instance of event-type E, and there is a causal law stating that Cs are always followed by Es«) (INUS) Mackie’s theory of causation as the relation of INUS condition (»c is the cause of e« means/iff »c is an insufficient but necessary part of a complex condition that is unnecessary yet sufficient for e«) (CTC) the counterfactual theory of causation takes »c is the cause of e« to mean »in the closest possible world, w1, which only differs from our actual world, w, in that c fails to occur in it, e fails to occur as well« (PTC) the probabilistic theory of causation treats »c is the/a cause of e« as equivalent to »e’s occurrence is more probable given c’s occurrence than given the non-occurrence of c«. As to RTC and INUS, they seem to make room for the idea that omissions can cause harm: »There is nothing in the ideas of a universal regularity or of a universal causal law (or in their associated idea of a sufficient condition) that precludes an omission from being part of a set of conditions sufficient to guarantee some harm. The absence of an event can seemingly complete a set

and/or supererogatory) depending on all the act-types of which it is a token ((i.e. act properties instantiated or exemplified by it). To take an infamous example. If I tell a lie to a would-bemurderer concerning the whereabouts of his next victim and thereby save the latter’s life, then my action is a token of at least two act-types, “telling a lie” and “saving someone’s life”, both partly determining (whatever may be) its actual or all-things-considered moral status. But if performing an act-token of the act-type X is perfectly obligatory, then failing to perform it must be wrong. Similarly, if doing something is forbidden, then refraining from doing it must be (prima facie) right. Hence different forms of omissions are and can be judged right or wrong (even if their moral status is perhaps derivative rather than intrinsic), but if so, they too exemplify or instantiate morally relevant properties (at least one, “failing to do what was perfectly obligatory”), and, consequently, there must be some mode of existence peculiar to them that explains how this can be. 18 For useful overviews of the competing theories of causation see Šuster 2003 and Moore 1999.

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of conditions as well as the presence of an event can.« (Moore 1997; 47)19 Still, trying to accommodate Singer’s omission to either of these two models of causation may strain our imagination a bit.20 First of all, Singer-omission threatens to violate the constraint on the temporal order of causal relata, as the following transformation of the case shows. Suppose that I made the decision to forego the donation on Tuesday, that the child I could have saved (by making a donation on Tuesday) died on Thursday, and that I didn’t purchase the stereo before next Monday. Did my omission then precede or follow its alleged consequence in time? This will obviously depend on when exactly I have omitted the life-saving donation – the moment I made the decision or the moment I spent the money on the stereo (or even some time inbetween)? It may seem that if h was the death of that particular African child, the one whose death on Thursday only a donation made no later than Tuesday could have prevented, I refrained from a life-saving donation when by making a decision not to donate on Tuesday I deprived myself of the opportunity to make a donation on Tuesday. Thus my refraining from a life-saving donation (action a) preceeds, as it should if it’s to qualify as its cause, the death of the African child (event h). This picture, however, raises another problem. If Tuesday decision not to donate deprived me of the opportunity to make a donation that would save that particular child from dying on Thursday, then in what sense can I be said to have refrained from it on Tuesday (or, for the same reason, on 19

This implication, however, is at odds with the legal theory and practice for they both deny omissions the status of a cause. We can take it as evidence that the concept of causation that the law employs – provided, of course there is one single legal concept of causation – is not the one of nomic sufficiency. (ibid.) 20 Here is a more general worry. Suppose we accept that the counterfactual »Had I made the life-saving donation (on Tuesday), that African child would not have died (on Thursday)« is true. It still doesn’t follow from this that my omission to donate caused the child’s death. True counterfactuals may describe other kinds of dependency relations besides causation: mereological relations, Cambridge type of dependency, and so on. Of those mentioned, Singer’s example looks closest to a Cambridge dependency to me. For in order to specify what action I have ommitted by purchasing a stereo we need to invoke the child’s death – »it was the one that could have saved that particular child’s life« –, in which case, however, it violates the independency-requirement for causal relata. Other common features of causal relations that I don’t see instantiated in the Singer-omission are the contact/proximity and, given physical distance between donors and receivers, an identifiable chain of events that help transmit causality from my omission to starvation, assuming that the latter is the most proximate cause of the child’s death.

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any other later day before next Monday)? It would then seem to follow that I did not omit the life-saving donation on Tuesday after all. The only candidate then left for the role of the act of omission in question is my purchasing the stereo on Monday. Which, however, is hardly any improvement at all, given that it commits us to the claim that the effect preceded its own cause. It all then boils down, it seems, to a choice between a rotten and a poisonous apple: either I never refrained from a life-saving donation, or if I did, it must have been some time after it had brought about the African child’s death. Hence, in the case of omissions, the alleged cause, as we have seen, may or may not precede its effect, depending on our (somewhat arbitrary) choice of the event that constitutes the very omission under consideration – our decision to forego the donation respects the constraint on temporal order, its implementation may not. The second worry is even more troublesome. Is this particular singular causation really covered by a true universal law stating that instances of the event-type »omission of donation« are regularly followed by instances of the event-type »human death«? The only reason I can see for making such a tenuous claim is the prior belief that omissions of donations by people in one part of the world cause suffering and death among people in another part of the world – but such a premise would make the argument for the existence of such a covering law undeniably circular. Absent this, the claim that such a covering law exists is, as far as I can tell, unfounded. Notice, however, the indirect implications of this for PTC.21 The question of whether PTC allows for the causal influence of omissions or not,22 must ultimately depend on whether my omission of a life-saving donation raises the probability that the child will die of starvation (or, in a variant of the same case, fatal disease) or not. Well, does it? One way to answer this question is by finding a covering law in the form of a true general statement, one describing some 21

Such double effect is no surprise, given that PTC is just a variant of RTC, substituting its definition of regularity in terms of a universal conjunction of classes of events with the one in probabilistic terms. For more on this see Šuster 2003. 22 Harris (1986) clearly seems to think that it does: »Whenever my conduct makes a difference to whether some state of affairs will obtain or not, that is affects the probability that it would or wouldn’t obtain in a sufficient degree (my emphasis, F.K.), I am responsible for this state of affairs. We can be equally responsible for what happens as a consequence of what we do and what happens because of our inaction or non-action. What matters is what effects our actions and decisions have on the world and other people, and not whether our responsibility for these effects is positive or negative.«

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sort of positive correlation between instances of the event-type »omission of a donation« and instances of the event-type »the death of a human being«. Now while it may be true that the more people donate the less (other) people die (of starvation and related causes), the other generalization needed for genuine causal impact »The more people buy(s) stereos the more (other) people die« (or even »The more stereos sold, the more human deaths due to starvation and disease«) is clearly far fetched. But then so is the suggestion that my purchasing a stereo (instead of making a donation) raises the probability of any child’s death of starvation. My impression is that whether the idea of causally potent omissions can be incorporated into PTC or not, remains at best unclear.23 Is my omission to donate a more plausible candidate for the role of an INUS condition for the child’s death then? The prospects for this look a bit better. Let’s first state the obvious. My omission of a life-saving donation (by means of purchasing a stereo instead) is clearly neither necessary nor sufficient for the child’s death. It is not necessary because if I purchased a bike instead or put the money on my savings account, she would have died just the same. And it is not sufficient, since other conditions have to be met as well in order for my omission to produce it: that there is no food or money to purchase it, that other people failed to donate as well, and so on. Still, is it perhaps at least a necessary part of an unnecessary, yet sufficient condition for her death? Well, probably not in the world as it is (see below). But maybe we can imagine a world, in which all it took to complete a satisfying explanation of the child’s death would be a description of my omission and nothing else could be put in its place? Well, we can certainly imagine a world in which my donation is the INUS condition for child’s survival. Suppose that my donation was expected and so everything else was also arranged: the bank clerk was ready to transfer the money to the local office, the office was kept open in order to proceed the cheque immediately, the shop-assistant in the local drugstore was ready to deliver the life-saving drug to the child the moment he received the cheque, the child was waiting for the 23

I have phrased this cautiously because of the limited scope of such a critique. Other types of omissions may be, and probably are, better positively correlated with specific harms. Take, for example, mum’s failure to feed her baby. It is plausible to assume that such failures are both highly correlated with children’s death rate and that the babies of those mums who fail to feed their babies are more at risk to die from starvation than the babies of those mums that feed their babies. The force of my above critique may depend on those features of Singer-omission that are unrelated to its’ being an omission of action.

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drug, and the drug worked. Further, suppose that due to some complications no one else could make a timely donation. Then given these assumptions, my donation was a necessary part of a sufficient condition for the child’s victory over the disease and the averted death threat. But can we turn this picture around and show the same relation to hold between my purchase of a stereo and the child’s death from disease? I doubt it. Both aspects of the INUS condition hang in the air, when we try to replace the life-saving donation with its omission. Even if one could imagine a world in which my spending the money on a stereo would be sufficient for the child’s death – which I doubt (it would have to differ from our actual world to the point of becoming unimaginable) – it would be quite impossible to show that in such a world my purchasing a stereo is a necessary part of such a causal arrangement, given the variety of means by which I can omit to donate. The problem, as I see it, cannot be solved by arbitrarily changing the description to »spending the money on some commodity« or to an even less definite »not donating the money«. The former is no more necessary for the child’s death than »spending the money on a stereo«, while the latter overlooks that I cannot avoid omitting the donation by doing something (else instead) and that apparently no such action would qualify as a necessary means of my omission. So despite Moore’s optimism, omissions may be ill-suited for the role of an INUS condition as well. CTC promises more, but only at first sight. For it seems to be true (by stipulation) that in the closest possible world in which I make the life-saving donation, the child survives. The question is Is the possible world in which I make the donation and the child survives really the closest to our actual world? Here is why I believe the answer to this question is No. Such a world, call it ws, will have to differ from our actual world, wa, not only with respect to my conduct, but also in several other features: the agency will have to send the money to its local representative, the local representative will have to first buy the medicine (or food) and then deliver it to the child, and, finally, the child will have to take it. My intuition is that there are many possible worlds in which I donate and the child dies anyway (because one of the elements in the above causal link is missing: either the money is not transfered, or it is not spent on buying medicine/food for that child or the medicine/food is not delivered to her or she doesn’t take/eat it),24 that are clearly closer to our actual world in terms of a 24

Nothing needs to go wrong with my donation, however, for it to fail to accomplish my declared goal. Given its modest size, it may simply fail to make a difference to anybody’s life

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number of the features they share. This may not even be the most serious challenge that omissions pose to the CTC. First of all, since causation is a dependency relation, it must relate real, positive events or their occurrences and not non-occurrences of events. The problem with omissions becomes apparent the moment we try to accommodate them to genuine events. (Dowe 2001) Once again, take the Singer-omission. If we try to explicate my omission of a donation as a disjunction of real events (i.e. actions that constituted my omission: my watching TV on Tuesday afternoon or my working on Wednesday or my purchasing a stereo on Monday or…), then it fails the requirement that events should not be too disjunctive.25 If instead we take the thing I did (my purchase of a stereo) as the cause of the child’s death, then we can no longer preserve the right kind of counterfactual dependence constitutive of causal relations – it is simply not true that had I not bought a stereo, the child would have survived, for I could have failed to save her in many other ways (by spending my spare money on a bike, for example). The CTC, we seem to be forced to conclude, cannot be used to undermine the premise (3). To summarize. On reflection, none of the theories of causation inspected manages to accommodate the idea of omissions as causes easily. While PTC or death. This is the point of what became known as the Imperceptibility Objection. Assume the given aid agency runs a food distribution camp with thousand people in need and the food rations are distributed equally among all (that it is what they call a nonearmarking aid agency). Each will then get one thousandth more food, surely an imperceptible addition. But if by making a donation to such an aid agency I cannot possibly benefit anyone, then my omission of such a donation cannot harm anyone either. Hence, buying a new stereo instead of making a donation to an aid agency cannot be deemed wrong (and I cannot be held responsible for the African child’s death) on the basis that I failed to prevent/avert a very great harm (at a relatively small cost to myself). So the upshot of the Imperceptibility Objection is that since by making a donation I couldn’t really benefit anyone, my failure to make a donation cannot possibly qualify as an instance of causing or allowing harm to anyone either. No one was worse off because of my decision or behavior, they were at best not better off. In which case, however, I merely failed to benefit them, but didn’t harm them. Nor did I seem to wrong them by not donating, for whatever rights they may have, my individual donation would hardly make a difference to whether the rights of any particular person in need (say his right to food) are being respected or not, or to whether she can exercise them or not. But if my buying a new stereo (where I could make a donation to an aid agency instead) neither harmed anyone nor wronged anyone in particular, how can I be held morally responsible for anyone’s suffering or death? (Cullity 1996; 54) 25 Every effect counterfactually depends on any disjunction of events which contains its cause as one of its disjuncts – allowing disjunctive events in the role of causes would thus open the door for most bizzare collections of causally irrelevant events.

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offers at least some hope, the prospects look much bleaker for RTC, INUS and CTC. What conclusion can we draw then, if any, from all this about the alleged causal (im)potency of omissions? What the above discussion warrants, I think, is a qualifying statement. Given that omissions are neither obviously empowered by causal powers nor obviously devoid of them, the issue of moral responsibility for unprevented harm will ideally be decided without presupposing the truth of either claim. In other words, the ideal solution to the paradox should not depend on any assumptions regarding the truth or falsity of (3). 4.3.

Further escape routes

The above discussion has left us with the following list of remaining options: (a)

revising our notion of cause/causation in order to make room for the possibility that omissions, despite being non-occurences of events, can cause other events or states – causation by omission, negative causal responsibility for the ocurrence of some state (Harris 1986), negative causal relevance of the behavior to its upshot (Bennett 1995) or fact-causation (Mellor 1995); rejecting or weakening the causality condition for moral responsibility, from, say, cause to causal condition or causal relevance26, from causal to explanatory role (Bennett 1995, Honore & Hart 1962), from direct causal role in the production of harm to (shared) responsibility for one of its causes (Sartorio 2004a), from genuine causation to influencing (raising or reducing) the probability of the occurence of a harmful event (Harris 1986); from genuine causation to quasi- (counterfactual) causation (Dowe 2001); or from causing the harmful event itself to causing a particular aspect of, or fact about, it (Sartorio 2004b, Mellor 1995); fragmenting the notion of responsibility into its several components and then checking their potential for explaining and justifying (makes sense of) our ordinary moral experience and practice: the blame and the resentment we feel, the fact that ascriptions of responsibility, liability, accountability tipically ground duties of reparation and/or compensation, give rise to legitimate expectations of apology and remorse, and so on;

(b)

(c)

26

An event C is causally relevant to another event E just in case the obtaining of C raises the probability of E obtaining, or at least makes E more probable than it would be in the absence of C. (See Šuster 2003.)

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giving up the negative responsibility thesis (Williams 1973, Kamm 1999).

The idea behind the first strategy is to loosen up, relativize or contextualize the notion of a cause. We do, after all, ocassionally say things such as “The plant died because I forgot to water it.”, indicating that it was my failure to water the plant that caused the plant to die, and this way of speaking makes perfect sense to us. Off course we could well rephrase the above into “The plant died because of the lack of water.”, but do we really need to? And if not, why not take this to mean that, at least in the context of providing an explanation for an unexpected event, we legitimatelly treat omissions as causes of other events or states of affairs?27 This strategy can then take two forms. According to a milder, contextualist variant, what element from the wide causal field will count as a cause of the event in question is primarily dictated by pragmatic and epistemic considerations. We expect things to proceed in a certain way and when our expectations are betrayed, we look for a minimal change in the initial conditions that can explain what/why things went wrong this time (in contrast to many other occasions).28 The other, more radical view treats causality as an explanatory and not an ontological relation – to be the cause is nothing over and above having the capacity for an explanation. In the context of our present discussion these differences can be ignored, for they both come to the same: omissions are possible causes of harm as long as they can explain instances of harm in a sat27 This is the line suggested by Honore & Hart’s classical treatment of the notion of criminal liability for harm due to one’s omission (Honore & Hart 1962), and then developed, in defense of the equivalence thesis, by John Harris (1974 and 1986). 28 The idea that the notion of cause (and/or causal explanation) is somehow relative or context-dependent, is not new. Consider, as an example of a similar approach, R. Martin’s treatment of the issue of what fact provides the explanation for an unexpected high-pitched whistle (in Martin 1997; 142-45). Or, if one assumes the deductive-nomological model of explanation: which of the premises that state antecedent conditions gives the explanation of the event? One might want to distinguish between recent and standing factual conditions and argue that it is the former that constitute the explanation. However, even though the difference is between those conditions that have become true recently (events?) and those that have been true longer (background conditions?), it ultimately depends on our epistemological situation (What is a new piece of information for us?) or practical interest/emphasis (What is it that I want to know or understand about my cat chasing a mouse: Why it is my cat and no one else’s? Why is it chasing that mouse rather than some other? Why it is chasing a mouse at all rather than, say, laying in the sun?...).

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isfying way. And since they, as we’ve seen, are perfectly capable of doing that, there is no principled reason for excluding them from the role of causes. The third route is suggested by Mellor’s critique of the view that causation relates event-particulars. Suppose there are causally linked particulars or events (such as in the true statement “My donation saved the child’s life.”) which correspond to causally linked appropriate facts (as reported in, let’s assume, a true statement “The child survived because I had made the donation.”). The former would still have to be reducible to the latter and not vice versa. Why? Well, because in order to prove that whenever causation links facts, it does so in virtue of linking the particular constituents of those facts (that is, that »the child survived because I have made the donation« is only true because my donation saved her life), we would have to show that such suitable causally linked particulars exist in every case of apparently factual causation. A simple example, however, shows that this not the case. Suppose that I don’t make the donation and so the child dies because of starvation (or disease), thus making “The child died because I had not made the donation.” true. By the looks of it, this instance of “E because of C” is no less causal than “The child survived because I had made the donation “. But here ‘C’ and ‘E’ assert that there is (no life and) no donation, they are negative existential statements, made true by the non-existence of such particulars, and a fortiori of causally linked ones. So here we have an example of factual causation without any causally linked particulars, which were supposed to be necessary for causation. Hence not only is the factualist account superior to the eventualist, it can also incorporate, by means of causally linked negative facts, the idea of causally efficient omissions and so uphold a potential source of our moral responsibility for unprevented harm. The same conclusion can be reached using Jonathan Bennett’s distinction between the negative and the positive causal relevance of someone’s behaviour to its upshot. Bennett explains the difference in terms of whether the weakest fact or proposition about that person’s conduct that sufficies to complete a causal explanation of the upshot is negative or positive. For instance, A may have put B in danger by removing a warning sign (to explain the danger to B at T2, we must mention A’s removing the sign at T1), or A may have left B in danger by not putting up a warning sign (in order to explain the danger to B at T2, we must mention A’s not putting up the sign at T1). This line of defense builds upon the idea that if certain facts about the agent’s conduct are explana-

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tory relevant to the upshot, then the conduct (or at least certain aspects of it) must be somehow causally relevant for it too. But once they can be shown to figure in a complete explanation of the upshot, they can ground ascriptions of causal responsibility. The other strategy available to the friends of equivalence (or at least negative responsibility) thesis is to relativize the divide between omissions and comissions, inactions and actions, making and merely allowing something (to) happen. It is hardly news that all past attempts to draw a clear boundary between the realms of acts and omissions are more or less defficient. Given the number of the first-rate authors that failed, isn’t that the evidence that the issue cannot be resolved on a principled basis? But if so, then we lack any grounds for upholding the morally important distinction between cases in which the agent has brought harm about himself, and the ones where he merely allowed it. Such a defetist conclusion can in principle be avoided, though. Maybe we can draw the line between harming and merely allowing harm without resorting to the notion of cause. If that could be accomplished, it would set the friends of the negative responsibility right back on the track in their search for a solution of the paradox. For what makes negative responsibility, unlike the positive one, highly controversial, is the alleged causal impotence of omissions (which actions don’t share). But once the two categories are no longer defined in terms of their respective causal power (or the lack thereof), the door opens for the possibility that a certain conduct may qualify as an action despite its lack of causal influence on the world, while some other may count as an act of omission despite its proven causal capacity/power.29 29

This line could take as a starting point Jonathan Bennett’s critique of attempts to explain the difference between making and allowing in terms of the causal relation between the agent’s behavior and its upshot. What Bennett attacks is the simple and widespread idea that something the agent’s does makes U obtain if what she does causes U to obtain, whereas in the case of allowing U to obtain the behavior in question and its upshot are not causally linked. Such an account of the difference between making and allowing, he warns, leaves out the non-causal consequences, especially the creating of dangers. For example, when we say “She put them in danger by reporting them to the Gestapo.” or “She left them in danger by not lying to the Gestapo about where they were hiding.” both facts about her conduct complete the explanation of their being in danger, but danger being a probabilistic state of affairs, neither relates in the causal way to their peril. A great deal of risk-making, including much of what morally matters, however, is non-causal. (Bennett 1995; 127) Besides, even though statements to the effect that a person or his behavior caused some upshot are much more likely to be ascertible - to be natural, reasonable, sensible, unmisleading things to say - when the conduct is positively or ‘makingly’

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Moral Responsibility for Unprevented Harm Desiderata

In the rest of the paper I will present my own, minimalist or conservationist solution to the paradox. I will not try to defend my own proposal indirectly, by discrediting the rival ones first. My impression is that each proposed solution, including my own, has its own comparative (de)merits and (dis)advantages. Instead, I will propose a list of uncontroversial desiderata (or criteria, if you prefer), that every proposed solution should aim to satisfy, and stipulate that these are simply better preserved by my solution. Firstly, the solution should not force us to radicaly revise either our conceptual scheme or our moral theory and practice or both. The more economical it is, the more points it scores. From the point of view of this criterion, the causalist solution (strategy (i) above) is clearly inferior to the other two, since it carries much higher costs in terms of adjustments that we would need to make to our moral conceptual scheme if we were to admit causation by omission. For as Moore (1999) who is more optimistic about the prospects of getting the metaphysics of causation by omission right than I am, but nevertheless remains sceptical about the whole enterprise, rightly points out: »If we literally can kill, rob, rape, maim, etc. by omission as well as by commission, then how can we explain the usual absence of legal or moral duties not to kill, etc. by omission? …if omissions cause deaths and are thus killings, why are these kinds of killings permissible for us? …Secondly, where we do have a moral and a legal duty not to omit to prevent harm, why are our failures to do so regarded as so much less blameworthy than are our failures to refrain from killing, etc. by commission? …if our omissions to save truly are a breach of our obligation not to cause death – that is, not to kill – why should this distinction be drawn at all, and with such force?« (ibid.; 32) Another way in which the claim of superiority of one solution over the others can be sustained is by showing that it does not presuppose any particular account of causation. It may well be that both the factualist and the agential model of causation are better suited to support the idea of omissions causing

relevant to the upshot than when it is negatively or ‘allowingly’ so, such statements have as good a chance of being true on the right of the making/allowing line as on the left which means that the making/allowing distinction cannot be elucidated by associating one side and not the other with ‘cause’. (ibid.; 133)

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harm than the eventualist one.30 This trial, however, is not over yet, the jury is still out there. The proposed solution should therefore be as independent of any speculations about the correct theory of causation as possible. The same goes for various accounts of harm and the attempts to draw a principled line between acts and omissions. Ideally, then, the solution should not presuppose either (i) that there is no such thing as omissions; or (ii) that even if there are acts of omission, we can never with any certainty tell them apart from commissions; or (iii) that the possibility of omissions causing (bringing) anything (about) is ruled out by the definition of either what it is to cause or omit something; (iv) or that omissions are harmless in virtue of some stipulated nature or essence of harm. Secondly, the solution should strive to preserve the maximum of our considered moral judgments about who is and who is not morally responsible for allowing harm. Consider the following list of cases. (WOMIT) The pacient suffocated on his own womit in the ambulance car taking him back to the hospital after his condition had deteriorated because the two doctors he had seen the day before failed to diagnose and treat it correctly. (ACCIDENT) Peter ran the child over because due to his heavy drinking he did not/was unable to hit the brakes in time. (CHEMICAL PLANT) Leakage of a dangerous chemical caused an explosion in the chemical plant because instead of repressing the button that would seal the room with the chemical off me and my colleague decided to keep reading the newspaper. (GENOCIDE) Over a million of Tutsies were killed by Hutus in Ruanda because the international community stood by and did nothing to prevent the massacre. (STEREO) An African child died because instead of making a life-saving donation I spent my spare money on a stereo purchase. (INDIANS) 20 captured Indian rebels were executed by a military squad after Jim had refused an offer by a commanding officer to save the lives of 19 of them by single-handedly executing a randomly chosen one instead.

30 Mellor 1995, as we’ve seen, certainly thinks the factualist is. For a statement and defence of agential model of causation (that does not, however, necessarily claim this particular advantage for itself) see Lowe 2002; 195-213.

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(NEGLIGENT MUM) A baby dies of food and water deprivation after she was left home alone by her mum who, on the way to a shopping mall, was (blamelessly) run over by a drunken lorry driver and then took ten days to wake up from a state of coma. (CONCEPTION DUE TO NEGLIGENCE) Tina got pregnant because she ignored Julie’s advice to take a pill/contraceptive before engaging in sexual intercourse with Jim. (CONCEPTION DUE TO FAILURE) Tanja got pregnant because the pill/ contraceptive she took on her gynecologist’s advice failed to prevent conception. (CONFERENCE) The morning session started an hour later because the speaker scheduled first didn’t show up. My guess is that most people would hold the two doctors morally responsible for the death of their patient,31 Peter for the death of the child, me and my colleague for the explosion, and finally Tina for her pregnancy and the resulting needs of a fetus, emphatically deny my responsibility for the death of an African child and Jim’s responsibility for the execution of 20 Indian rebels, and probably remain divided on the case of genocide, unwanted pregnancy due to the failure of contraceptives and the death of the baby due to starvation.32 An ideal solution will divide the moral territory roughly along the same lines and explain why it is cut the way it is. (Presumably, it will build on the assumption that one can only be morally responsible for »harming by omission«, if one is morally responsible for the omission itself.) Reflection may disclose, of course, that the indiscriminate cases above (and many others that fall on the same side of the divide) have nothing in common that we could assign any moral relevance. Such observation, if correct, would then provide prima facie evidence that our search for a single principle of moral responsibility for unprevented harm that can account for such a variety of intuitive judgments as this, was naive and ill-founded. (This will later provide a basis for my parsimonious/pluralist conservationist approach.)

31

Actually, in court they were acquited on the basis that the cause of the patient’s death was suffocation and not the two doctor’s malpractice or breach of professional duty. 32 The only reason I can think of for holding mum morally responsible for the tragic death of her baby is that her behavior was negligent – she failed to foresee the risk of leaving the baby home alone and, consequently, failed to take necessary precautions against such risk.

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Thirdly, given its gigantic task, the solution should purport to offer at least some tentative explanation of why we make erroneous judgments, some sort of error theory for our mistaken ascriptions of moral responsibility to agents for the consequences of their omissions. The more systematic such an explanation, the better. And finally, the solution should preserve the right order of explanation and/ or justification. The right order is the one in which the causal element of responsibility is accorded explanatory and/or justificatory priority over the (still to be identified) moral one, or, to simplify a bit, where moral responsibility entails causal responsibility and not vice versa (provided there is any relation of entailment between the two at all). Thus the solution will gain our approval insofar as it eliminates any trace of what Moore (1999; 28) calls »the supposed aphrodisiac effect of culpability on causal potency«, a confused idea that moral qualities (such as culpability, wrongness, blameworthiness, moral desert, and the like) can cause not only beliefs and behavior, but also death, suffering, violation of bodily integrity, and so on. We have seen this confused idea operative in Oderberg’s account of »killing by omission«, but it also fuels the puzzling intuition some people have that the more culpable the agent for her harmful act or omission, the greater her causal share in producing that harm. 6. A conservationist solution to the Paradox of Moral Responsibility for Unprevented Harm Where does all this leave us? Given the above list of constraints it may be worth exploring a surprisingly unpopular option (c) before we undertake major theoretical and conceptual revisions for the sake of preserving our allegedly authoritative considered moral judgments. Let’s take a second look at our ordinary notion of responsibility then. For a start, semantic rules that govern the application of this term are, as we have already seen, incredibly loose. When we say things like »We, the Westerners, are responsible for the plight of people in the developing countries.« what we are after is often not so much to express regret or impute blame or guilt on someone, but simply to identify the author (»It was us who brought it on them.«). Apart from pure causal responsibility, there is also normative assessment – by ascribing responsibility to someone for some event or state we may simply want to suggest that that person (either her conduct or her character) is eligible for moral assessment in virtue of standing

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in the appropriate relationship to this event or state. Then there is the narrow meaning of »moral responsibility«, one that amounts to liability to moral sanctions and gives rise to duties of apology, compensation, reparation, punishment, moral feelings (reproach, guilt, gratitude,) and the like. Is it really plausible, then, in the face of overwhealming evidence of an almost impenetrable semantic jungle, to credit ordinary morality with the capacity to keep these and many other meanings, hidden under this umbrella term, strictly separated and, as a result of this, blindly trust our ordinary judgments in this compartment of moral thought and practice? If we want to restore some credibility in our belief system, we need to identify and provisionaly define various meanings in which we seem to use the word »responsibility« first; and then correct, set and apply the criteria for their use to our actual and hypothetical situations as a test for our discredited ordinary judgments. The following is the list of four central meanings that we attach to »responsibility«:33 Authorship (causal) responsibility – when we say of someone that he or she is responsible for h in this sense, all we mean to say is that he or she has played some (minor or not) causal role in the production of h. Outcome responsibility – when we say of someone that he or she is outcome (O-)responsible for the consequences of his or her actions what we mean is that, other things being equal, the resulting benefits and burdens should fall to him or her. This notion is normative (governed by considerations of justice) and expresses/shows our interest in fair/just allocation of benefits and burdens resulting from people’s choices and actions. Character-reflecting responsibility34 – attributions of character (C-)responsibility involve moral assessment of the agent, thereby opening the door to praise and blame, reward and punishment. In making them we ask whether 33 In compiling this list I draw heavily on Miller 2004. I have added causal responsibility to it, renamed »moral responsibility« »character-reflecting responsibility« and reinterpreted the relations that hold between them. Miller believes character responsibility entails outcome responsibility (but not vice versa), but remedial responsibility doesn’t (it may be that people in the developing countries are outcome-responsible for their own poverty, but given that they are incapable of pulling themselves out of the misery, it must be someone else’s remedial-responsibility to effect that.) In contrast, I think the second is independent of the first, whereas the third is not. So you can be C-responsible (but not also R-responsible) for h without being at the same time O-responsible for it. 34 Miller (2004) uses the unfortunate (because ambigious) term »moral responsibility« for this kind of responsibility. Haji (1998) suggests »moral appraisability« and defines it as follows: »to say that a person is morally appraisable for her action is to say that she is deserving of either

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the agent intended the consequences that flowed from his action, whether he acted negligently, whether he acted in breach of the obligations that he should have met, and so on. Negative character responsibility, one that attracts blame, requires that the agent’s conduct reveals some kind of moral fault, whereas outcome responsibility does not. Remedial responsibility – the idea of remedial or R-responsibility comes into play when an individual or a group of people suffer harm of some kind and we want to identify an agent whose job it is to put that situation right; we say that the agent in question has a remedial responsibility to end the suffering. The most common way of settling the issue of remedial responsibility is by looking for whoever is outcome responsible for the harm in question – if A is outcome responsible for harming another person, P, then A is also remedially responsible for compensating her. Let me summarize these informal descriptions of our basic uses of the term »moral responsibility« in a more formal way (the »->« sign is not to be understood as the equivalence-relation; rather it designates some sort of explicationrelation): A is A-responsible for h -> A has played some causal role in producing h. A is O-responsible for h -> The costs of (amending) h should be borne entirely or primarily by A; A is O-responsible for b -> The benefits of b belong entirely or primarily to A./The benefits of b should be entirely or primarily enjoyed by A. A is C-responsible for h -> A deserves blame, scorn, resentment, punishment for bringing h about. It would be appropriate for A to feel bad about himself for bringing h about. A is C-responsible for b -> A deserves praise, admiration, reward, for bringing b about. It would be appropriate for A to feel good about himself for bringing b about. A is R-responsible for h -> A ought to amend h, or make it right again, or compensate, or apologize to, someone for having brought h about. We have drawn the necessary distinctions, so what now? I’d like to claim that this minimal ‘theoretical’ effort, combined with a set of plausible criteria for praise or blaime for that action«, While Rosen identifies C-responsibility with blameworthiness or culpability, i.e. liability to blame or some fitting complex negative emotional response toward the agent for having done, or having refrained from doing, something.

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their use (one that tries to avoid the pitfalls of the Paradox), is by itself sufficient to dispense with the alleged need to revise either our ordinary notion of causation or our ordinary account of conditions for moral responsibility (or, as Sartorio suggests in 2004a, both). So what are these criteria, then, and how are they reated to each other? I think it is pretty clear that those of character responsibility are the least demanding. All it takes for an agent to be C-responsible for some occurring harm is for it to bear some revelatory relationship to her character. But as long as both being and not being contemplated as one of possible options can testify to good or bad qualities of the agent’s character or personality (the former to her indifference to suffering, the latter to her forgetfulness), this condition should not be difficult to meet. When it comes to outcome-responsibility, it is much harder to resist those powerful intuitions that have originaly motivated the pursuit of the first strategy.35 Those who are still reluctant to drop them I can only direct to the arguments given above for the view that hard-core moral responsibility (one that implies personal guilt and liability and gives rise to duties of reparation) entails causation and that ‘causation by omission’ is simply a misnomer. The conservationist solution has enough explanatory resources to deal with such persistent intuitions, however. Sometimes they will be validated when only upon closer inspection the evidence of agent’s causal intervention is diclosed that we initialy overlooked. More often though, we will explain them away as a residue of 35

Here is an example of such an intuition (thanks to my colleague Nenad Miščević who put it forward and insisted that my solution cannot simply explain it away). We hold the mother that stopped feeding her child, O-responsible (and not just C-responsible) for the death of that child if the child dies of starvation. Such judgment is resilient to the kind of considerations that we would expect it to respond to if we had C-responsibility in mind when we hold her morally responsible for her child’s death. We also cannot easily resort to an alternative, causal account of what went on between the two of them that could ground the ascription of O-responsibility. We may feel inclined to say that by assuming responsibility for the child she has created expectations on behalf of others who could provide for her child’s needs instead and thereby, even if only undeliberately, precluded an alternative course of action that could save her child. But even on the assumption that the two are living on a desert island, so that her past conduct cannot be said to cause the child’s death indirectly, by way of preventing others, through the false expectations she has instilled in them, from helping her child, we still intuitively hold her O-responsible for her death. When hardpressed with counter-examples like this one, I can either deny that the given intuition about mum’s O-responsibility for her child’s death is correct, or accept it and explain it in terms of some sort of causal involvement on the part of mum in the process that eventually led to her child’s death.

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either deontic judgments or some other kind of disguised disapproval. Perhaps the most convincing proof of the claim that O-responsibility entails causation lies in its close relation to R-responsibility. Ascriptions of these two types of responsibility are governed by similar considerations of justice, the only difference being in the point at which the judgment is asked – with O-responsibility we are interested in what would be a just or fair allocation of those benefits and costs that flow from agent’s action before they are distributed, whereas with Rresponsibility the starting point is the state of an unjust distribution of costs and benefits that urgently needs to be remedied. But since causal considerations play an essential (or even paramount) role in determining desert the pattern of which, in turn, forms the basis for redistribution of costs and benefits, it is safe to assume that the very same causal considerations will play an equally important role in the context where we try to determine the pattern of just or fair distribution for the first time. This common feature of O- and R-responsibility thus explains both their similarity and the role that causation plays in both. What are we to think, on the basis of that, about the Singer-omission? I’d like to believe it helps us preserve the two intuitions that might look incompatible at first sight. Most people, I guess, share my discomfort about both an outright denial of any responsibility for the suffering of distant strangers and Singer’s ill-devised attempts to instill some sort of feeling of guilt in us for their tragic fate. The conservationist solution helps us find a grain of truth in both. For we both are and aren’t responsible for the death of the African child in case we spend the money that for her means a difference between life and death, on the purchase a stereo instead. We are character-responsible insofar as in our decision to forego a life-saving donation (or, alternatively, in our failure to attend to her valid moral demand) certain gross character flaw of ours become manifest, such as calous indifference to suffering, mindless selfishness, perverse reasoning, self-serving self-deception, and the like. So Singer was partly right after all. On the other hand, if the claim he advances is about our outcome- (as well as remedial-) responsibility for her death, he is clearly wrong; it would be both preposterous and in contradiction with the principles of fairness and justice to accuse those of her death that had nothing to do with it (skipping thereby many that did).

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5.3. Outline of an error-theory for ascriptions of responsibility for unprevented harm The causes of our mistaken moral judgments are manifold, ranging from the complexity of the task we set ourselves to the defective tools we use in our attempts to accomplish it. Combine this with a few misconceptions and the influence of wishful thinking and you get an explosive mixture. Let’s start with misconceptions and false expectations. We tend to regard harm as either a result of bad luck or as someone’s fault. Once we have ruled out bad luck or chance, we automatically assume that there must be a culprit and start searching for him/her.36 This simplification explains, to some degree, why our intuitive judgments are so hard to pin down and justify by appeal to a single secondorder moral principle. Consider a typical hard case, the infamous Columbine massacre. Five years after the shooting at the Columbine High School that left the total of 13 highschool kids and teachers dead, the poll results show 83 percent of Americans believe the parents were partly to blame. Tom and Susan Klebold, parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two murderers, however, deny any responsibility: “Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised; if anything, he did it in contradiction to the way he was raised.” They insist they haven’t done anything for which they need forgiveness. They believe what they call the “toxic culture” of the school - the worship of jocks and the tolerance of bullying - was the primary force that set Dylan off, but readily admit to lack an explanation of why their son went amock and find themselves in general unable to provide one. The journalist, David Brooks, ends the article with a puzzling conclusion: “My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior.” (Brooks 2004)

36

»A person P is morally responsible for an event’s e occurring only if e’s occurring was not a matter of luck.« (Zimmerman 1987; 374) If you side with Thomson, Prijić and Boonin-Vail in denying Tanja’s responsibility (in Conception due to failure) for the existence and the resulting needs of her fetus, but nevertheless hold Tina (in Conception due to negligence) responsible for the existence and the needs of her fetus, and tend to justify the difference in your judgment by appeal to the role that bad luck played in the former, but not also the latter case, you implicitly share this or similar view. For another illustration of the difference between culpable and blameless wrongdoing see the discussion about Two-Buttons and Two-Buttons-one-Stuck in Sartorio (2004a).

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Quite often, in ascribing responsibility for the »consequences« of omissions, we simply overlook the role that chance (factors beyond agent’s control) played in its production. At other times, we either exaggerate, diminish or completely ignore the causal role that other agents played in the production of certain harm (or benefit). We treat responsibility as a treshold, a yes-or-no concept, when clearly it is a gradual or scalar notion, which admits of fine degrees. With respect to poverty, the above cognitive defects are simply compounded by what cognitive psychologists call motivational bias – we tend to believe what we want to believe and we want to believe what brings least discomfort to our lives. When looking for a self-serving excuse for our indignant consumerism, we readily point our finger at local governments as those primarily (hence more) responsible for alleviating the suffering of the poor and preventing their deaths. But then again, in our rage against people’s indifference to suffering we may also be guilty of multiplying and projecting responsibility. This observation is particularly pertinent to Singer’s example, where the more proximate causes of, and consequently the more natural candidates for those responsible for, the plight of the poor surely include, among others, corrupt local governments and officials, wrong governmental priorities, parties to the civil war that has caused devastation, cut food supplies and forced people to flee to refugee camps, unfair rules of land ownership and inheritance laws, and so on). With respect to negative responsibility for the plight of the poor two questions hence naturally arise: Do we, indifferent wealthy people share responsibility with those who more directly caused it? And if we do, why and how big is our share? It seems to me that in such cases our intuition that in addition to positive responsibility a case can be made for negative responsibility as well is simply misguided – what we mean is rather that it was wrong not to do anything to prevent the harm, not that we are literally responsible for it.37 37 One thing that distorts our judgment in the case of life-saving donations is the collective or social aspect of responsibility. This becomes apparent if we contrast them with the example in which the baby dies because her mother stopped feeding her. Our intuition in the latter is clearer both because the issue of authorship does not arise (with the same force) and because the truth of the appropriate conditional (»Had the mother fed her baby, the baby wouldn’t have died.«) is far less controversial. Part of the reason for this is that in this case the connection between the two relevant states, the triggering – »Mum doesn’t feed the baby« - and the proximate cause of the baby’s death – »The baby is not getting any food« - is unmediated, whereas in Singer’s case we have to postulate a long, mediated causal chain ranging from »I have purchased a stereo« via countless intermediate states to the distant effect »A child in Africa has died«, and such a causal chain obviously takes magic powers on the part of my omission to activate.

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Some impetus for the equivalence thesis may come from resistance against the asymmetrical treatment of harming and allowing harm. Those who find them morally equivalent, i.e. regard allowing and causing harm as equally objectionable or wrong, may feel compelled to extend their judgment about their respective moral status to the issue of the agent’s responsibility for the outcome. If allowing harm is morally no better than causing it, they may wonder, why find people less responsible for the harm they have allowed than the one they have themselves caused? Such a suggestion, however, is mistaken, for it overlooks that the two are only contingently linked. Those features that make an act wrong often don’t amount to the agent’s responsibility either for the act itself or its consequences as well. Even a consequentialist that takes all of the consequences of an action into account, including the most remote and unpredictable/unforseeable ones, in determining the moral status of an action, exempts the agent’s from the responsibility for the resulting harm that he could not predict or foresee. For him, badness of some of our action’s distant and unpredictable outcome may make our action wrong without thereby rendering us blameworthy or deserving of blame for producing it. 6.

Conclusion

In the paper, I have first presented and then tried to resolve what I called the Paradox of Moral Responsibility for Unprevented Harm. The paradox arises from a conjunction of our firmly held beliefs about responsibility, causation and human agency. I have identified three possible solutions to this problem (revision of our ordinary notion of cause, revision of our ordinary account of moral responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and revision of our considered moral judgments in the light of an analysis of the notion of responsibility) and assessed their comparative merits and flaws. I have rejected the first for its internal problems and argued for the superiority of the third (conservationist one) over the second in virtue of instantiating, to a larger degree, certain theoretically desirable qualities. Throughout the paper I have been pursuing a practical moral issue, the one of moral responsibility of the mighty and the wealthy for the perils of the weak and the poor. I have rejected Peter Singer’s claim that by omitting life-saving donations we become, morally speaking, accomplices to those who primarily cause(d) their plight. There are plenty reasons for feeling bad about ourselves

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