Why are killing and letting die wrong?
Why are killing and letting die wrong?
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00028.x
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发表时间：
1995-06-01
影响因子：
2.2
通讯作者：
Hanser, M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hanser, M
普通的思想赋予了杀人和让人死之间的区别以道德意义：显然，在某些情况下，杀人是错误的，但允许让人死。然而，在非道德上，杀人和让人死看起来很相似。可以肯定的是，两者之间存在差异，但两者似乎都有重要的“结构”特征：在两种情况下，代理人都控制着某人的命运，在两种情况下，代理人都以这种方式行事，以至于人死亡。这种相似性反过来又引起了人们对这种区别的道德意义的怀疑。怀疑论者认为，杀戮显然是令人反感的，因为它恰恰拥有与任其死亡相同的特征。这些共同的特征确保了无论一个特工是杀人还是让人死，他的行为都有助于导致或解释某人的死亡。所涉及的因果关系或解释关系并不相同，但它们确实属于一个属;根据怀疑论者的观点，这些关系的属同一性才是道德上重要的，而不是它们的具体多样性。[2]我感谢杰夫·麦克马汉对本文倒数第二稿的评论，感谢菲利帕·富特、罗伯特·亚当斯和克里斯托弗·贝尔肖对本文部分来源的博士论文的评论。在写论文的时候，我得到了夏洛特W。纽科姆基金会，我也很感激。最后，我和沃伦·奎因就这篇论文的主题进行了许多有价值的谈话;我很难过，他没有活着读到我最终写的东西。如果他说了这篇论文会更好，
Ordinary thought accords moral significance to the distinction between killing and letting die: There seem clearly to be circumstances in which it would be wrong to kill a person but permissible to let someone die.’Yet non-morally, killing and letting die can appear quite similar. There are differences, to be sure, but the two seem to share important “structural” features: In both cases the agent has control over someone’s fate, and in both cases the agent acts in such a way that the person dies. This similarity in turn invites skepticism about the distinction’s moral significance. Surely, thinks the skeptic, killing is prima facie objectionable owing to its possession of precisely those features that it shares with letting die. These shared features insure that whether an agent kills or lets die, his behavior helps cause or explain someone’s dying. The causal or explanatory relations involved are not identical, but they do belong to a single genus; and according to the skeptic, the generic identity of these relations is what matters morally, not their specific diversity. 2I am grateful to Jeff McMahan for commenting on the penultimate draft of this article, and Philippa Foot, Robert Adams, and Christopher Belshaw for commenting on the doctoral dissertation from which it partially descends. While writing the dissertation I was supported by a fellowship from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, for which I am also grateful. Finally, I had many valuable conversations with Warren Quinn on the topic of this paper; I am saddened that he did not live to read what I eventuallywrote. This paper would have been better if he had,