Fiona Woollard, Doing and Allowing Harm

Abstract

Fiona Woollard’s recent book, Doing and Allowing Harm, is an impressively rigorous defense of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA). Woollard understands DDA (a central component of common sense morality) as the claim that other things being equal, doing harm is harder to justify than allowing harm: the personal cost that would permit me to allow a certain harm to befall a person may not be enough to permit me to do that same harm to that person. For example, I’m seemingly permitted to allow a child to drown if rescuing him results in the loss of my own life. But I wouldn’t be permitted to push the child into a pond, let’s say (whereupon he would drown), if that is the only way to save my own life. Anyone seeking to provide a robust defense of DDA must fulfill two tasks: (1) clearly describe the difference between doing and allowing harm and (2) show how that difference is morally relevant; show, for example, how that difference between doing and allowing harm warrants the view that the former is harder to justify than the latter. Woollard, in Part I, seeks to fulfill task (1). Building off of the work of Philippa Foot and Jonathan Bennett, Woollard provides a descriptive analysis of the nature of the distinction between doing and allowing harm. Part I also includes a helpful discussion on the complex issue of actively withdrawing life saving aid (does removing a safety net from underneath a person who is free falling or disconnecting someone from a respirator count as doing or allowing harm?). Woollard, in Part II, seeks to fulfill task (2). Here Woollard gives a different (though seemingly equivalent) characterization of DDA: roughly, a prima facie principle that both prohibits harm doing and permits harm allowing. Building off of the work of Warren Quinn and Frances Kamm, Woollard argues that DDA must be true if anything, including our bodies, is to genuinely belong to us. In my view, this is the most convincing aspect of the book. What she says here is quite plausible and