Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the "New Harms" A central question moral and political philosophers have asked in recent decades is whether well-off people have moral duties to aid those deprived of basic necessities, and if so how extensive these duties are. No one disputes that people have duties not to harm others; these so-called "negative" duties are about as well-established as any moral duties could be. But the very existence of "positive" duties to render aid is controversial, and even among those who concede their existence the nature and extent of such duties is disputed. A critical concern about them is that once we admit duties to aid into the moral realm they threaten to take over and invade our lives: it is hard to draw a line that will prevent them from becoming relentlessly demanding. When we think of all the people in the world who lack basic necessities, and how much the reasonably affluent could do to help them, the slippery slope looms before us. Peter Singer made it clear in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," if it had not been clear before, arguing for what seemed to many like inhumanly demanding duties of the rich to aid the poor. 1 But Singer was not alone, and his essay would not have produced the effect it did had it not tapped into deep concerns-on the one hand, about the extent of our responsibilities to relieve poverty and suffering; on the other, about the intrusive consequences of admitting such responsibilities for our ability to live our daily lives as we see fit.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Is doing nothing sometimes as bad as doing something bad? In this or some less naive form the question I address in this paper is an old one that has been asked not only by philosophers and religious thinkers but also by ordinary people in their more reflective moments. We have recently seen its relevance to such issues as abortion, euthanasia, and the legitimate conduct of war. Active euthanasia is distinguished from passive, aiming to kill from killing as an unintended effect of one's aims, bringing about harm from letting it happen. The Catholic doctrine of the double effect endorses the moral distinction between what one positively does and what one allows to occur.