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Is the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ a valid one and does it therefore create problems for a global egalitarian understanding of morality and justice? That is to say: is a situation in which natural inequality of some sort (like in talents, health, or natural resources) negatively affects persons morally less unjust than circumstances in which our actions and social institutions generate detrimental disparities within practices?

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As it turns out, in the literature we find convincing arguments that deny that the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ establishes a normative one-way polarity to the effect that actions are always worse than omissions. There is no doubt that there are some situations in which doing harm is worse than allowing harm. If I walk down the street and see a house on fire with people inside it screaming for help it is certainly morally reproachable if I become paralyzed by fear and as a result the people trapped in the house perish in the fire. However, it is clearly morally worse if I would not be a mere passer-by but the one who lit the fire in the first place. Nonetheless, as Shelly Kagan points out, there are many situations that indicate that “doing harm […] has no intrinsic moral significance, in and of itself.”4 00 _{He takes up an example by James Rachels in} which an evil-minded person lets his cousin drown in the bath tub so he can inherit his fortune.4 01 _{Here the distinction clearly does not do the normative} work it does in the case of the house on fire.

What Kagan’s example does not show, though, is that the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ is never of relevance. Certain more or less direct but purposeful and special relationships (such as family ties, friendships, or even citizenship) can well be thought to trigger special obligations. But this does not mean that obligations deriving from such ‘active’ relationships always trump moral duties that we can be thought to have in general and irrespectively of our causal involvements in events or relations. Our special obligations can be morally justifiable only if they arise within the context or framework of general moral duties (as they are outlined by, for instance, the principle of global

400 _{Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder: Westv iew Press, 1998), p. 95.} 401 _{See Shelly Kagan, ibid., pp. 98, 99.}

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egalitarianism) that are not limited to those aspects we are causally responsible for.4 02

As Frances Howard-Snyder explains, when we examine the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ and the objections to it, we find that

The claim that doing harm is no worse than allowing harm flies in the face of powerful intuitions to the contrary. I believe that these intuitions can be partially explained away by pointing to other morally significant distinctions (distinctions concerning intentions, difficulty or ease of avoiding the harm, etc.) that often coincide with the distinction between doing and allowing harm.4 03

Thus, Howard-Snyder thinks that the distinction “does not refer uniquely.”4 04 This, though, is bad news for practice-dependent theories of justice. After all, defenders of such views rely on a strong notion of interaction. According to the latter, we are actively involved in establishing, maintaining, and participating in our own institutional practices in a way that we are not in the institutional schemes of others. This is why James believes that “in the absence of trade (and any further interaction), inequality across societies in total economic output […] is not unfair [/unjust] to members of the worse-off society, since no one can claim to have had a hand in creating the social advantages realized in a foreign society.”4 05 _{This is furthermore the reason James completely excludes non-} participants unaffected by a practice from the scope of justice: “those unaffected

402 _{For this point see also See Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders (Cambridge: Cambridge}

Univ ersity Press, 2004), ch. 9, and Arash Abizadeh, Pablo Gilabert, “Is there a Genuine Tension between Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism and Special Responsibilities?”, Philosophical Studies 138(3) (2008): pp. 349-365. Here Abizadeh and Gilabert argue that “special responsibilities arise within the framework of (and are not in tension with) the ideal of moral equality of persons. […] General duties sometimes condition, but at other times weigh against special responsibilities” (Arash Abizadeh, Pablo Gilabert, ibid., p. 361). For an application to this thought to democratic theory see furthermore Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion”, Political Theory 36(1) (2008): pp. 37 -65.

403 _{Howard-Sny der, Frances, "Doing v s. Allowing Harm", The Stanford Encyclopedia of}

Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/ archiv es/fall2008/entries/doing-allowing.

404 _{Howard-Sny der, Frances, ibid.}

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by a practice have no claim under either [the egalitarian as well as the Due Care] principle.”4 06

Of course there can be circumstances in which counteracting socially-caused harm is morally more important than fighting naturally-caused harm. A government might, for instance, be faced with the choice of either preventing civil war among two groups of its citizens or to help another group to avoid starvation caused by a local draught. Here it might be of greater importance that a civil war will not break out. Such a conflict not only affects the groups involved but also undermines the solidarity within the whole society. Thus, in this situation we might have reasons to think the government ought to prioritize preventing the socially-caused harm over counteracting the naturally-caused threat.4 07

However, what is crucial to note about this example is that it does not establish a principled prioritisation for eliminating socially-caused harm. There are many other circumstances in which the balance of reasons might tell us first to address a naturally-caused harm due to its extremely damaging effects on human beings. Examples like the civil war case therefore do not show that doing is per se worse than allowing harm. In fact, we can think of a multitude of cases in which natural events as such create strong duties for us. If I see you getting hit on the head by a roof tile and am the only one around to assist you then I am under a binding obligation to help you or call others who can help. Furthermore, this obligation is not an optional one, which is indicated by the fact that if I run

406 _{Aaron James, “Distributive Justice without Sov ereign Rule: the Case of Trade”, pp. 543, 544.} 407 _{I thank Marcel Verweij for this example.}

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away and my omission can be proven I can get legally convicted of not assisting a person in danger.4 08

James, as we saw, motivates the moral primacy of being causally responsible for harm by appealing to Scanlon’s contractualist account of morality. To Scanlon, only personal and generic, but no impersonal reasons are of direct relevance to our thinking about what we owe to one another. James wants to use Scanlon’s claim to motivate the thought that only personal and generic reasons play a role in our interactions. Impersonal reasons, which James understands to be those one cannot invoke as part of a personal (self-referential, agent-relative) objection and among which he counts a commitment to equality as such,4 09 would then not be part of what morality covers. However, Scanlon himself accepts the thought that impersonal ideas and values can be morally important for us. He explains how he understands the way they influence our thinking by pointing out that:

One possibility is that [the impersonal value] is essentially a moral idea (rather than one whose basis lies in a notion of rationality or in a conception of value that is independent of ideas of right and wrong). On this view it is (at least) part of “what we owe to each other” that we must promote certain states of affairs, plausibly called “the good”.4 1 0

Therefore, also James’s appeal to the Scanlonian picture of morality cannot justify a normative primacy of the detrimental effects of human actions over naturally harmful states of affairs.

408 _{We should note that this example refutes James’s ‘Attributability Condition’, see Section}

Four of this chapter.

409 _{See Aaron James, “The Significance of Distribution”, pp. 27 9, 280.}

41 0 _{Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, p. 86. Elsewhere, Scanlon thus also}

acknowledges the possibility that “impersonal v alues can be relevant to the reasons a person has for rejecting a princ iple ‘on his behalf’” (see Thomas Scanlon, “Reply to Gauthier and Gibbard”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66(1) (2003): pp. 17 6-189, p. 186).

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Finally, we should note that the strong notions of interaction that practice- dependent theories rest on are not self-evident. Such rich notions, to recall, are necessary to establish the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ as a sharp contrast between human-caused inequality and purely naturally-occurring inequality. For two of the great modern philosophers, Kant and Locke, hold (as we saw) that owning objects or appropriating them always presents a case of excluding all others from this object, which requires justification.4 1 1 _{That is to say, by} acquiring something and excluding others from its use one always makes a claim on others to accept their exclusion. From Kant’s and Locke’s perspective, acquisition and ownership are not morally neutral acts but have to be morally acceptable to everyone else.

However, if we accept (as most philosophers do) Kant’s or Locke’s view about initial acquisition and private property, it is not implausible to think that, by owning an object, we much more do something to others, rather than merely

allowing something to happen to them. Acquiring and owning therefore have a

sense of activity to them and for Kant and Locke require giving a justification to everyone else – not only to one’s fellow participants. This tells us that it is not unreasonable for us to think of existing practices as involving doing things to others. What that means, though, is that we cannot as neatly square practice- internal effects of interaction with ‘doing’ and practice-external effects of interaction with ‘allowing’ as practice-dependent theorists like to think. This is to say that, even if the ‘doing versus allowing distinction’ were correct, it is not clear that interactionists are entitled to think that we allow, rather than actively

41 1 _{See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (trans. Mary Gregor) (Cambridge:}

Cambridge Univ ersity Press, 1996), pp. 7 3, 88, and John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company , 1980), p. 21.

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uphold, global inequality. We thus have good reasons to dismiss the first objection against the idea of the global scope of justice.