Ethics

It may be unethical to, through inaction, allow bad things to come to pass. But is it unethical to fail to make good things happen, in the absence of any actual ill?

Comments

It sounds like you are drawing a distinction here, but I am not sure that you are. Suppose you have the ability to intervene in a certain situation in a way that makes the outcome better. If you do not intervene, then the outcome will be X; if you do intervene, then the outcome will be X+. Suppose you decide not to intervene. Now we can say of you that you have allowed a bad thing (X) to come to pass; and we can also say of you that you have failed to make a good thing (X+) happen.

Now you might save your distinction by defining some threshold such that, if X is below this threshold, then your non-intervention is allowing a bad thing to pass, and if X is at or above this threshold, then you are merely failing to make a good thing happen. But I don't see a good way of defining such a threshold and also no good reason to give it moral significance: Wherever the threshold is, why should it be unethical to allow a very small bad thing just below the threshold and not unethical to fail to make an enormously good thing happen just above? (In numbers, with the threshold set at zero and other things, especially cost to the agent, being equal: why should it be unethical to fail to lift the outcome from -0.1 to 0 even while it is not unethical to fail to lift the outcome from 0 to 10,000?)

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