He clarifies the view in terms of a distinction between 'harmful direct agency' and 'harmful indirect agency'. The former is that "... in which harm comes to some victims, at least in part, from the agent’s deliberately involving them in something in order to further his purpose precisely by way of their being so involved." And it's this kind of harmful agency that the DDE counts as especially weighty.
Sep 29, 2023·edited Sep 29, 2023Liked by Bentham's Bulldog
Alex Pruss notes that lots of double-effect advocates in the Catholic tradition (e.g. Anscombe, Koons, and so on) think that "if something is known to inevitably and directly follow from something that one intends, then one intends that, too." This rules out disingenuous cases (e.g. bombing Hiroshima and saying your intention to was to end the war, not kill civilians). That could be useful for some of your cases (though it also raises questions about switch-flipping in the trolley case; Anscombe herself thought switch-flipping was wrong).
It's especially brutal when non-consequentialist vegans want to use it to accommodate crop deaths, since it's not our intent to kill field mice when we eat wheat. But of course, in the same sense, it's not most bacon cheeseburger eaters' intention to torture pigs and cattle either.
Bombing a bridge full of innocent civilians to achieve a trivial wartime aim is wrong in roughly the same sort of balance-of-probabilities way that a consequentialist would expect. If you were to reduce the number of civilians and increase the importance of objective enough, it would slide into morally good territory.
A defender of DDE doesn't need to appeal to the categorical wrongness of intentional murder to explain this scenario. It's still bad in the non-absolutist way that recklessly endangering others for marginal benefit is bad.
Check out Quinn's 'Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Double Effect' https://philpapers.org/rec/QUIAIA-2
He clarifies the view in terms of a distinction between 'harmful direct agency' and 'harmful indirect agency'. The former is that "... in which harm comes to some victims, at least in part, from the agent’s deliberately involving them in something in order to further his purpose precisely by way of their being so involved." And it's this kind of harmful agency that the DDE counts as especially weighty.
Alex Pruss notes that lots of double-effect advocates in the Catholic tradition (e.g. Anscombe, Koons, and so on) think that "if something is known to inevitably and directly follow from something that one intends, then one intends that, too." This rules out disingenuous cases (e.g. bombing Hiroshima and saying your intention to was to end the war, not kill civilians). That could be useful for some of your cases (though it also raises questions about switch-flipping in the trolley case; Anscombe herself thought switch-flipping was wrong).
It's especially brutal when non-consequentialist vegans want to use it to accommodate crop deaths, since it's not our intent to kill field mice when we eat wheat. But of course, in the same sense, it's not most bacon cheeseburger eaters' intention to torture pigs and cattle either.
Bombing a bridge full of innocent civilians to achieve a trivial wartime aim is wrong in roughly the same sort of balance-of-probabilities way that a consequentialist would expect. If you were to reduce the number of civilians and increase the importance of objective enough, it would slide into morally good territory.
A defender of DDE doesn't need to appeal to the categorical wrongness of intentional murder to explain this scenario. It's still bad in the non-absolutist way that recklessly endangering others for marginal benefit is bad.