The Moral Status of Enabling Harm

Abstract

According to the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, it is more difficult to justify doing harm than it is to justify allowing harm. Enabling harm consists in withdrawing an obstacle that would, if left in place, prevent a pre-existing causal sequence from leading to foreseen harm.

Why We Should Avoid Artists Who Cause Harm: Support as Enabling Harm

“…12 Samuel Rickless refers to this position as the "Equivalence Hypothesis" and contends that, when faced with the decision between doing harm on one hand and either allowing or enabling harm on the other, enabling and allowing harm are morally equivalent. 13 If true, this would threaten my claims here and in the next section that we collectively, and each of us individually, have a responsibility to avoid supporting ACH in ways that enable harm. However, I disagree that we should see enabling harm as morally on par with allowing harm.…”

Harm, responsibility, and enforceability

“…Another important respect in which our analysis differs from Woollard's is that we regard enabling harm as a distinct category from doing and allowing harm, while she treats enabling as a species of allowing harm (ee e.g. Rickless 2011;Foot 1994). She claims that 'while enabling and clear allowing are morally distinct, they have enough in common to both be treated as cases of allowing for the purpose of drawing a binary distinction between doing and allowing' (Woollard 2019, 11).…”

“…Some theorists do treat enabling harm as a species of allowing it (see e.g. Rickless 2011). But we argue, on the contrary, that enabling is a manner in which an agent can contribute to harm.…”

Untitled

“…Accordingly, I understand refugees as persons who have been forced to flee their state of origin owing to the fact that their human rights are under threat or lack protection in that state, and who therefore seek adequate human rights protection elsewhere. 2 See, for example: "Like the bystander we have an unambiguous duty of rescue towards them" (Betts and Collier,Refuge,99); "If we can provide shelter and safety to refugees without endangering ourselves it would be wrong to turn them away" (Dagger,"Politics,Rights,and the Refugee Problem," 191); "The 'principle of mutual aid' holds that if two strangers meet and one is in need of help, the other person ought to help if the need is urgent and the risks and costs of helping are 'relatively low'" (Walzer,Spheres of Justice,33); "There is a parallel T consider certain practices used by Western states in response to refugees that may make us question whether such states are indeed innocent bystanders. Serena Parekh's The Ethics of Forced Displacement is a notable exception to this dominant approach.…”