I got my doubts when I read an article by Christian
Barry et.al. who put forward the idea
that there is yet a third category, namely enabling, and that the bipartite doing-allowing
distinction is not exhaustive. In order to substantiate their thesis the
authors do not found their point only on theoretical arguments, but they test
it in an experimental setting. Moreover, they don’t consider the distinction in
general but they investigate only the distinction between doing and allowing harm. In their investigation they use four
cases:
Push: A cart
stands at the top of a hill. John pushes it. The cart rolls down the hill and
injures Tom, who is sitting at the bottom of the hill.
Stayback: A cart
is rolling down a hill. John could put a rock in the way of the cart that would
stop it, but he does not. The cart rolls down the hill and injures Tom, who is
sitting at the bottom of the hill.
“Push and Stayback are straightforward in the sense
that their classifications under the traditional doing-allowing distinction
have been uncontroversial among philosophers”, so Barry et.al. “Philosophers generally agree that Push and Push-like cases
are cases of doing harm, and Stayback and Stayback-like cases are cases of
allowing harm” (p. 68). Actually I don’t fully agree with this remark, but for
this blog, I can ignore my criticism.
Two other cases used by the authors in their
investigation are:
Interpose: A cart
accidentally starts rolling down a hill. Tom, who is sitting at the bottom of
the hill, will not be injured by the cart if he can get out of the way of its
path. John puts a rock on the ground. The rock stops Tom, and he is injured by
the cart.
Remove: A cart
is rolling downhill towards a point where there is a rock that would bring it
to a stop. John removes the rock. The cart rolls down the hill and injures Tom,
who is sitting there.
While Push
and Stayback are cases of doing and
allowing, Interpose and Remove exemplify enabling, so Barry et.al. In order to explain this, they
refer to a study by Barry and Øverland who introduce two factors that separate
enabling from doing and allowing: “Relevant action, the first factor, obtains
if the question of how an agent is relevant to some harm refers to some action
of theirs.” (cf John’s pushing of the
cart by which Tom is injured in Push.)
“The second factor obtains if there is a complete, intact causal process
initiated by the agent’s action that links this action to the harm.” (The cart
pushed by John injures Tom in Push) (p.
70). Both factors are present in Push
and absent in Stayback. However, in Interpose and Remove the first factor is present but the second factor isn’t:
John’s action has an impact on the result of the cart rolling down (namely that
Tom is injured), but the relation between John’s action (moving the rock) and
Tom being injured is indirect. Therefore we say that moving the rock enables
that Tom gets injured and that’s why enabling is a special category next to
doing and allowing.
Is this idea also shared by non-philosophers? In order
to investigate this, the authors presented several versions of the Push etc. cases to a number of test
persons. In a first experiment testees were asked to classify cases as doing or
allowing harm. The result was that Push cases
were clearly seen as doings and Stayback
cases as allowings. However Interposing and
Remove cases scored somewhere in
between: About half of the testees saw them as doings and the other half as
allowings. This suggests, so the authors, “that the traditional bipartite
doing-allowing harm distinction cannot capture Interpose and Remove cases.” (p.
77). That enabling can be seen as a separate category was confirmed in a second
experiment. Now the test persons were asked to categorize cases as “doing
harm”, “allowing harm” or “enabling harm”. It appeared that Interpose and Remove cases were clearly more often seen as enablings than Push and Stayback cases (which hardly were). A third experiment investigated
the question whether enabling harm is normatively distinct from both doing harm
and allowing harm by asking the testees in different test versions whether John
should compensate Tom for the injury. Also now the Interpose and Remove
cases emerged as a special category, though not so clearly as in the other
experiments.
I think that the conclusion of Barry et. al. is convincing that there is not
a bipartite distinction between doing and allowing harm, but a tripartite
distinction between doing, allowing and enabling harm. This result has not only
theoretical consequences. It is only practical, for it appears that enabling
harm is a specific normative category. This means that it has to be allowed for
when talking about questions of guilt, responsibility and compensation. What
remains is the question whether the tripartite doing-allowing-enabling distinction
applies only when someone is harmed, or whether this tripartition generally
replaces the dichotomy of doing and allowing.
