The doctrine of double effect, together with other moral principles that appeal to the intentions of moral agents, has come under attack from many directions in recent years, as have a variety of rationales that have been given in favor of it. In this paper, our aim is to develop, defend, and provide a new theoretical rationale for a secular version of the doctrine. Following Quinn (1989), we distinguish between Harmful Direct Agency and Harmful Indirect Agency. We propose the following version of the doctrine: that in cases in which harm must come to some in order to achieve a good (and is the least costly of possible harms necessary), the agent foresees the harm, and all other things are equal, a stronger case is needed to justify Harmful Direct Agency than to justify Harmful Indirect Agency. We distinguish between two Kantian rationales that might be given for the doctrine, a "dependent right" rationale, defended by Quinn, and an "independent right" rationale, which we defend. We argue that the doctrine and the "independent right" rationale for it are not vulnerable to counterexamples or counterproposals, and conclude by drawing implications for the larger debate over whether agents' intentions are in any way relevant to permissibility and obligation. 1 This paper resulted from discussions that grew out of a graduate seminar on non-consequentialist ethics that we co-taught at UCSD in 2010. We would like to thank the following seminar attendees for their helpful comments and probing questions: Craig Agule, Amy Berg, Nanhee Byrnes, Alex Marcellesi, Veronica Pear, and our colleague, Dick Arneson. We presented a shorter version of an ancestor of this paper at a stimulating workshop on doing harm at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in July 2011. We are very grateful to the members of the Equipe NoSoPhi who organized and participated in the workshop: Laurent Jaffro, Catherine Larrère, and Vanessa Nurock. We benefited greatly from the constructive comments and helpful suggestions we received from David Brink, William Fitzpatrick, Matthew Hanser, Derk Pereboom, and an anonymous referee for this journal. Thanks to you all. Finally, we would like to acknowledge our greatest debt, the one we owe our teacher, mentor, and friend, Warren Quinn, whose work and intellect we so admire, and who will never know just how grateful we are for his support and encouragement at a critical time in our lives.

Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For common-sense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions, even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. People who leave dogs in their car on a hot day or forget to pick something up from the store as they promised seem to be blameworthy. If moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and its moral significance, it appears that the protagonists of these cases are not morally responsible. This chapter considers and rejects a number of influential views on this problem, including a view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “Attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. The chapter proposes a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them.

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There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies (N = 968), we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non-moral intuitive probabilities.

In this paper, I argue that Book II, Chapter viii of Locke's Essay is a unified, self-consistent whole, and that the appearance of inconsistency is due largely to anachronistic misreadings and misunderstandings. The key to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is that the former are, while the latter are not, real properties, i.e., properties that exist in bodies independently of being perceived. Once the distinction is properly understood, it becomes clear that Locke's arguments for it are simple, valid and (in one case) persuasive as well.