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ABSTRACT. Joseph Boyle raises important questions about the place of the
double-effect exception in absolutist moral theories. His own absolutist theory
(held by many, but not all, Catholic moralists), which derives from the principles
that fundamental human goods may not be intentionally violated, cannot
dispense with such exceptions, although he rightly rejects some widely held
views about what they are. By contrast, Kantian absolutist theory, which derives
from the principle that lawful freedom must not be violated, has a corollary -
that it is a duty, where possible, to coerce those who try to violate lawful freedom
- which makes superfluous many of the double-effect exceptions Boyle allows.
Other implications of the two theories are contrasted. Inter alia, it is argued that,
in Boyle's theory, that a violation of a fundamental human good can be viewed
as a cost proportionate to a benefit obtained, cannot yield a double-effect
exception to the prohibition of intentionally violating that good, because paying
a cost cannot be unintentional.
Alan Donagan, late Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Philosophy, California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, U.S.A.
Boyle would agree, I believe, that the human actions that are
subject to moral judgement are changes or persistences in an
agenf s bodily or mental state brought about by his will, or
Voluntarily', in the technical sense of that word. Hence refusing to
bring about such a change is as much an action as bringing one
about.1 An agent voluntarily causes an effect of such a voluntary
change or persistence if and only if he believes that it can have
that effect, not necessarily that it must. And he intentionally causes
an effect he voluntarily causes if that effect is either the end for
which he causes it, or among "the precise steps [he] takes to
achieve" that end (Boyle, 1991, p. 479).
What you intend is therefore what you plan to do, whether as
your end or as among the means by which you plan to accomplish
it. You do not intend something you will to do if you will it
neither as your purpose nor as contributing to your purpose, even
if you foresee that carrying out your plan will cause it. A good test
of whether or not you intend a particular foreseen effect of an
action is to suppose that, by some fluke or miracle, the action does
not have the effect you foresee, and to ask whether you then
consider your plan carried out and your purpose accomplished.
Boyle contends that, if intended effects are conceived as planned,
the distinction between them and unintended side-effects is clear
in principle, although there will be borderline cases.2 Confusion
arises when unintended effects are conceived, not as planned, but
as causally more remote from the change or persistence in the
agenf s body that causes them than are intended effects.
Some Catholic moralists resist Boyle's analysis on the ground
that no effect of an action can be a side-effect if any step the agent
takes to bring about his end is a sufficient condition for it. For
example, Stephen Theron argues as follows that killing a foetus,
general, all moralists who accept the freedom of the will in a non-
compatibilist sense, limit an action's effects, and a fortiori what its
agent intends to bring about in doing it, to those that follow from
it in the course of nature and the ordinary operation of social
institutions, and not from the free reactions of others to it. (Thus
actions in the ordinary course of business, for example, those of
postal officers in delivering a letter that has been mailed, are not
counted as free reactions.) The principle on which they do so is
that a free reaction to an action is a 'new action' ('novus actus'), the
effects of which are their effects, and not those of the action to
which they are reactions. It follows that a novus actus interveniens
terminates not only the effects of the original action, but also what
its agent intentionally brings about in doing it. And it also follows
that what an agent plans or intends can extend beyond what he
plans or intends to bring about. He may intend that others react in
a certain way to what he does; but he cannot intencl to bring it
about that they do, because bringing that about is not in his
power.
These distinctions are the foundation of both Catholic and
Kantian views of the treatment of action in face of threats, whether
by radically unjust legal authority or by private criminals. History
offers numerous and horrible examples of somebody powerful
and evil commanding somebody else to do something morally
abominable (e.g., to choose patients for lethal or radically in-
jurious medical experiments) under the threat that otherwise he
will have something even more abominable done. Sophie's
predicament in William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, is an
example: she is told that if she does not choose one of her two
children to be sent to the gas chamber, both will be sent. Although
the case is fictional, the records of the concentration camp crimes
of the Nazis contain numerous similar ones, many of them even
more vile. Yet, as most Jewish writers on the Nazi genocide have
concluded, such cases, although agonizing for the victims, are not
morally problematic. Given that it is absolutely morally
prohibited to collaborate in certain irreparable wrongs, as it will
be in any absolutist moral system, that others will react to your
refusal to collaborate by doing some graver wrong cannot be a
morally relevant reason for your not refusing. By not refusing you
will collaborate in a wrong for which there are no amends. Yet
you cannot plead that if you refuse, you will cause that graver
wrong; for you will not cause it. Nor can you plead that, in failing
to refuse, you intended only to prevent the graver wrong, and that
your collaboration was the unintended side-effect of trying to
prevent it; for even if the threatener refrained from doing what he
threatened, you did not prevent him from doing it: that is, you
neither caused nor could have caused his not doing it. Your belief
that you intended to is at best self-deception.4
Any action which has as a side effect the sort of harming of someone which it is
plausible to think absolutely prohibited if brought about intentionally is covered
by the Doctrine of Double Effect, and this class of actions is very extensive
indeed... (Boyle, 1991, p. 492).
fork; and that, finally, depends on some unfortunate who has one
and only one choice: to switch the points (to deflect) or to leave
them as they are (not to deflect).
Because prima facie their principle forbids deflecting harms from
one set of innocents to another as reducing the latter to mere
means to the good of the former, Kantians were apt to be discom-
posed by being mocked as upholding A.H. dough's satirical
commandment:
causes the harms they suffer. They are caused by the scarcity of
resources, not by how they were allocated; for they could not have
been allocated better.
Plans of Boyle's kind (iii) are those in which different kinds of
harm to one and the same person are allegedly side-effects of
different courses of action between which a choice must be made:
for example, between relieving a terminally ill patient's severe
pain by analgesics that will probably shorten his life, and refrain-
ing from probably shortening his life by leaving his pain un-
treated.
In both cases the side effects of taking the action will include the probability of
death, but the side effects of the alternatives are also bad, and include some
which it is plausible to think [it] would be absolutely impermissible to inflict
intentionally (Boyle, 1991, p. 491).
6. SUMMING UP
NOTES
1
A fuller exposition and defence of my views about the nature of human action
may be found in Donagan, 1987. Although Boyle's approach, in which he largely
follows Grisez, differs from mine, they seem to me to coincide with respect to
causation and intention.
2
This analysis of action is largely the work of Germain Grisez. It has been
adopted by his collaborators John Finnis and Boyle himself. It coincides in many
respects with contemporary analytic theories, especially that of Donald David-
son. How it may be put to work in moral theory may be studied at length in the
admirable and inevitably controversial treatment of the (now) apparently
successful U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence in Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle, 1987.
3
Theron 1984, p. 76. Theron is criticizing my endorsement (Donagan, 1977, p.
159) of an analysis by Germain Grisez anticipating Boyle's, but he does not refer
to Grisez directly.
4
Theron's bewilderment at my refusal to call martyred Christians suicides
betrays either ignorance that actions do not cause voluntary reactions to them, or
oblivion that the martyring of Christian confessors is a voluntary reaction by
others to their confessions of faith (Theron, 1984, p. 75).
5
Boyle expressly recognizes that an absolutist interpretation of Kant is possible
(Boyle, 1991, p. 493), although he mistakenly concludes that mine is not for a
reason examined in note 7 below.
6
Although my understanding of Kanf s absolutism is not that of all Kantians, as
Boyle's of Catholic absolutism is not that of all Catholics, it is revisionary only in
taking the second of Kant's three formulas of the categorical imperative, the
formula of the end in itself, to be fundamental, and not equivalent, as he himself
believed, to the first, the formula of the universal law of nature. The reasons I
have given for this in Donagan, 1977, still seem to me sound.
7
Boyle interprets my version of Kantian morality (in Donagan, 1977) as
absolutist only in name, on the mistaken ground that it absolutely prohibits only
the causing of certain harms at will while permitting it in an indefinite set of
conditions, arrived at by an "enormously complex and intuitive" procedure
(Boyle, 1991, p. 493). Of course, / think my procedure neither intuitive in any
sense in which Boyle's for arriving at his list of fundamental harms is not, nor
more complex than that of any other moral theory that seriously claims to be
complete in outline, including his. But, however that may be, he is flatly
mistaken about what I tried to do. I began by determining the kinds of action it is
impermissible to do at will only as the first step to specifying the kinds it is
impermissible to do under any circumstances. E.g., observing that falsehood at
will is absolutely prohibited was my first step towards specifying what lying is
(viz., falsehood in free communication, when it is not expected under some
convention, e.g., of courtesy); and I concluded that lying is absolutely prohibited.
8
I have departed from Ladd's translation only in leaving the noun 'Recht' and
cognate expressions untranslated.
When juxtaposed with their absence from absolutist moral theories like Kanf s,
the paucity of the cases in which the doctrine of double effect is indispensable in
theories like Boyle's suggests another possibility. Perhaps the doctrine of double
effect, which notoriously did not become explicit until very late, is an intruder in
the Catholic moral tradition; and perhaps Kant was not mistaken in failing to
discern any fundamental difference between Catholic and Lutheran views of
common human morality, and in imagining that his theory captured the essence
of both.
REFERENCES
Boyle, J.: 1991, 'Who is entitled to double effect?', Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy 16,475^94.
Donagan, A.: 1977, The Theory of Morality, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Donagan, A.: 1987, Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, New York.
Finnis, J., Grisez, G., and Boyle, J.: 1987, Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism,
Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Foot, P.: 1978, Virtues and Vices, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp.
19-32.
Kant, I.: 1797, Metaphysik der Sitten, J. Nicolovius, Koenigsberg, 2 vols. Page
references are to Vol. 6 of the Pussian Academy's edition of Kanf s works. The
translation used is by J. Ladd: 1965, Kant: The Metaphysical Elements of Justice,
Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
Quinn, W.: 1989, 'Actions, intentions and consequences: The doctrine of double
effecf, Philosophy and Public Affairs 18,334-351.
Theron, S.: 1984, Two criticisms of double effect', The New Scholasticism 58,67-83.