Absolute principles and double effect

Abstract

MORALISTS have traditionally appealed to the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) in order to maintain certain absolute moral prohibitions, such as that against the intentional killing of human beings, in the face of situations which seem to reduce them to absurdity or incoherence. Mr Hanink ('Some Light on Double Effect', ANALYSIS 35.5, 147-15 ) believes that Mr Geddes' version of the PDE ('On the Intrinsic Wrongness of Killing Innocent People', ANALYSIS 333., 93-97) can, when expanded and modified, serve this purpose and be defended against my criticism that it generates sophistical and unacceptable conclusions and reduces both the PDE and the absolute prohibitions it is meant to support to vacuity ('Intentionally Killing the Innocent', ANALYSIS 34-1, 16-19). On Hanink's account (p. 15 o), we may perform a single act with both an intended good and a foreseen bad effect, so long as the act itself, apart from its bad effect, is legitimate; the bad effect is not intended, as an end or as a means; and the good effect outweighs the bad. These conditions are satisfied by a craniotomy performed to save the mother's life, and by the setting of an explosive charge under the man who is blocking the only exit from a flooding cave. But in each of the other four cases which I discussed-the cannibalistic killing of the cabin-boy; the use of a man's body for transplant surgery; Gerstein's co-operation with the S.S.; and the execution of a scapegoat-at least one condition is not satisfied: the act itself may be an illegitimate assault, apart from its fatal outcome; the good effect may not outweigh the bad; or the act which has the bad effect is not itself the act which has the justifying good effect but a means to it, so that we cannot outweigh the bad effect by any good effect of the same act.