The two fold effect of transactions is explained in The Two-Fold Effect of Accounting.
The doctrine of double effect explains the permissibility of an action that causes a serious harm, such as the death of a human being, as a side effect of promoting some good end.Sometimes it is possible to cause a harm as a side effect of bringing about a good result even though it would not be permissible to bring about the same good end.
In his discussion of the permissibility of self-defense in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas is credited with introducing the principle of double effect.64, Art.Killing one's attacker is justified if one does not intend to kill him.In his opinion, killing in self-defense is not permissible, arguing that it can only proceed from some degree of self love.The act of self-defense may have two effects, one of which is the saving of one's life.If a man repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful.
A prohibition on apportioning efforts with killing as the goal guiding one's actions, which would lead one to act with greater viciousness, is the interpretation of the passage.
The difference between causing a morally grave harm and a good end is emphasized in later versions of the double effect principle.For certain categories of morally grave actions, the principle of double effect combines a special permission for incidentally causing death for the sake of a good end, when it occurs as a side effect of one's pursuit.In traditional Catholic applications of the principle, the prohibition is absolute.There are two traditional formulas below.
There are four conditions for applying the principle of double effect.
The bad effect isn't intended in the conditions provided by Joseph Mangan.
If four conditions are verified at the same time, a person may licitly perform an action that he anticipates will produce a good effect and a bad effect.
The fourth condition is usually used to determine if the harm is adequately offset by the benefit.
It is reasonable to assume that agents who regret causing harm will get rid of them.This assumption could be made explicit as an additional condition causing harm.
In order to minimize how much harm they cause, agents who cause harm as a foreseen side effect of promoting a good end must be willing to accept additional risk.The agent's current circumstances and options may determine whether this condition is satisfied.
Double effect is part of a secular and non-absolutist view in which a justification for causing harm as a side effect might not be enough to cause the same good end.Double effect is a distinction between direct and indirect agency.Double effect distinguishes between agency 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.Direct agency doesn't require that harm itself be useful or that what is useful be related to the harm it helps bring about.He says that some cases of harming that the doctrine speaks against are not intentional harming, because neither the harm itself nor anything that is very close to it is intended.The moral significance of the distinction between intended and merely foreseen harms is what underlies the moral difference between direct and indirect harmful agency.
Many morally reflective people have been persuaded that double effect must be correct.Some of the examples cited as illustrations of DE have a lot of appeal.
Does the principle of double effect have an explanatory role?It is important to clarify what the principle is supposed to explain.There are three misinterpretations of the principle.
The principle of double effect shows that agents can bring about harmful effects if they are just foreseen side effects of promoting a good end.Double effect applications always assume that a condition has been satisfied.The value of promoting the good end outweighs the harm in traditional formulas.
The reason for administering drugs to relieve a patient's pain is not dependent on the fact that the physician does not intend to hasten death.Doctors are not allowed to relieve pain with potentially lethal doses of opiates simply because they anticipate but do not intend the cause of death to be a side effect!The justificatory context is provided by a variety of substantive medical and ethical judgments.The consent of the patient or patient's proxy is not considered to be a concern with proportionality because of its weighing of harms and benefits.
The fifth condition on causing harm is that the agent try to minimize the harm.Double Effect is not a principle of issuing blanket permission on causing harm that yields a benefit.The agent's circumstances and options will determine whether this fifth condition is satisfied.For example, as techniques for managing pain have been refined, what used to be an adequate justification for hastening death in the course of pain relief would now fail because current techniques provide the better alternative.For a full discussion of this application of double effect, see section 6.
Double effect contrasts the permissibility of causing a harm as a merely foreseen side effect of pursuing a good end with the impermissability of aiming at the same kind of harm.It is accepted that it is wrong to aim to cause harm to someone as an end, so it isn't part of double effect's distinctive content.The principle states that agents don't aim to cause morally grave harms as an end and that they seek to guide decisions about causing harm while pursuing a morally good end.Those who would provide medication to dying patients in order to alleviate suffering with the side effect of hastening death are different from those who do the same.The doctor's ultimate end is not to cause death, but to alleviate suffering.
When it is impossible to bring about the good end without the harm, the principle of double effect is used.If the principle assures agents that they may do this provided that their ultimate aim is a good one that is worth pursuing, the condition is satisfied and the harm is not only regretted but minimized, then there's a third common misinterpretation of double effect.It is necessary that causing the harm is not implicated as part of an agent's means to bring about the good end.Double effect is wrongly assumed to allow acts that cause harm because those harms were not the agent's ultimate aim or were regretted rather than welcomed.The principle of double effect is more specific.Because they were brought about as part of the agent's means to realizing the good end, regrets that were produced regretfully may be prohibited.
The principle of double effect is defended by some who think that the motives, intentions, and attitudes of an agent are more important than the permissibility of a course of action.If the permissibility of an action depended only on the consequences of the action, then the principle of double effect would not have moral significance.Some opponents of double effect deny that the distinction between foreseen and intended consequences has any moral significance.
Many criticisms of the principle of double effect are not based on assumptions about the difference between intended and foreseen consequences.They want to know if the principle adequately codifies the moral intuitions at play in the cases that have been taken to be illustrations of it.There is a difficulty in distinguishing between grave harms that are regretfully intended as part of the agent's means and grave harmful side effects.Those who wish to apply double effect must provide principled grounds for doing so.The application of Double Effect to explain the impermissibility of performing an abortion to save a woman's life is often criticized.Lawrence Masek offers a thoughtful defense of the principle of double effect, which proposes to see what is intended by an agent as narrowly or strictly as possible, while also distinguishing between motivating side effects and non-motivating effects.
The proposal to substitute the concept of direct agency for the idea of intending to cause harm to someone as a means would effectively broaden the category of results that count as cases of causing intended harm.If the permissibility of his action is explained by Double Effect, the soldier who throws himself on the grenade in order to shield his fellow soldiers from the force of an explosion must not sacrifice his own life to save the others.Many have argued that this is an implausible description of the soldier's action and that his action is permissible even if he does intend to let himself be blown up by the grenade as a means of protecting the others from the explosion.If someone else pushed the soldier on the grenade, we would say that the harm was done by the person who did it.We should say that it is intended in this case.When lethal force is used in self-defense, the same kind of argument can be made.They doubt the claim that Double Effect explains the permissibility of these actions if the arguments are correct.Double Effect is silent about cases in which it is permissible to cause a death.
Double effect does not depend on the distinction between intended and merely foreseen harm, but is best formulated using a difference between direct and indirect agency.It would be implied that cases of self-defense and sacrifice would count as direct agency.It is clear that one intends to involve the aggressor or oneself in something that furthers one's purpose precisely by way of his being so involved.The moral significance of the distinction between direct and indirect agency could not be explained in a way that explained why it might be permissible to kill in self-defense or sacrifice one's own life to save the lives of others.If the range of cases to which it applies is limited, double effect might be easier to explain and justify.If the distinction between direct and indirect agency can be drawn clearly, then perhaps the objections outlined above could be answered.
When we believe that it is permissibly brought about, and if we are more inclined to describe a harmful result as part of the agent's means, we can call it a merely foreseen side effect.Independently grounded moral considerations have influenced how we draw the distinction between means and side effects.The ways in which we distinguish between results that are intended or brought about intentionally and those that aren't have been shown to be influenced by normative judgments in such a way as to bias our descriptions.This was first pointed out by Gilbert Harman in 1976, but is now referred to as "The Side Effect Effect".According to Richard Holton, norm violation merely involves knowingly violating a norm, while complying with it involves an intention to comply, and that this might explain the asymmetry Knobe has documented in judgments about whether bad and good results are brought about intentionally.The principle of double effect for serving as an evaluatively neutral basis for moral judgments raises questions about the suitability of the distinction.
Does the principle of double effect explain why it is possible to switch a runaway trolley away from a track with five people on it and onto a single person track?It seems clear to many people that if one were to switch the trolley, the harm to the one person would not be intended as part of one's means of diversion.If the harm to the one is described as a merely foreseen side effect of changing the trolley, then this alone does not show that it is permissible to cause it.The principle of double effect can be invoked to explain the permissibility of changing the trolley if the condition is satisfied and the agent attempts to minimize the harm or identify alternative means of saving the five.The impermissibility of pushing someone onto the track in front of the speeding trolley is explained by Double Effect.The difference in permissibility depends on whether the death of that person is a means or a side effect of saving them.
There are three groups to discuss the Trolley Problem and the principle of double effect.There are consequentialists who think that the widespread reluctance to push someone in the path of the trolley in order to save the five is irrational.The Trolley Problem is proof that Double Effect is an implicit principle guiding moral judgement.Some argue that it would be wrong for a bystander to switch the trolley and that people's willingness to view it as permissible is a result of inadequate reflection or insufficient emotional engagement.The group would include those who uphold the principle of double effect, but deny that it provides a permission to alter the trolley, as well as the ones who reject it.
The difference between the Terror Bomber and the Strategic Bomber is seen as the least controversial example of the principle of double effect.The judgement that the strategic bomber acts permissibly is widely affirmed.Both sides in World War II engaged in terror bombing, which caused a lot of controversy at the time.The kind of bombing carried out by Allied forces in Germany and Japan would be condemned by the view that terror bombing is always impermissible.
When strategic bombing is taken to be justified by the principle of double effect, it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.Military strategists have an obligation to avoid harm to civilians.There is an issue about the convention that constrains military decision-making and the principles that underlie it.Judgements that are outside the scope of Double Effect are the most relevant considerations.The Rules of Customary International Humanitarian Law are displayed on the website of the Red Cross.They include protections that are denied to minimize harm to civilians.
Rule 15.Constant care must be taken to spare civilians and objects during military operations.In any event, all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
Rule 20.Unless circumstances allow, each party to the conflict must give an advance warning of attacks that may affect the civilian population.
Rule 24.To the extent feasible, each party to the conflict must remove civilians and objects from the vicinity of military objectives.
When the principle of double effect is included in the content, there is a sufficient condition of permissibility for bombardment that affects civilian populations.The duty to warn or remove civilians is never mentioned in the example concerning strategic bombing.
All of the examples that double effect has been invoked to justify can not be explained by a single principle.There are a variety of considerations that may affect the permissibility of causing harm.
The principle of double effect requires that the good effect outweighs the bad effect, but only if there is sufficient reason for doing so.Constructive independent justifications for causing the kind of harm in question are used when double effect is invoked, according to some critics of the principle.The independent considerations do not depend on the distinction between intended and merely foreseen consequences.If this criticism is correct, then perhaps the cases that have traditionally been cited as applications of the principle of double effect are united only by the fact that each is an exception to the general prohibition on causing the death of a human being.
An explanation for the unity of its applications could be found in the history of the principle of double effect.It would not be permissible to kill an attacker in self-defense, to sacrifice one's life to protect others, or to hasten death as a side effect of administering sedation for intractable pain if one were to assume that it is absolutely prohibited to cause the death of a human being.These cases can be seen as cases of non-intentional killing if one assumes that what is absolutely prohibited is to cause the death of a human being intentionally.There is controversy about whether a unified justification for non-intentional killing can be provided and if so, whether that justification depends on the distinction between intended and merely foreseen consequences.
Double Effect is best understood as resting on a distinction between direct and indirect agency according to an essay written by Dana and Samuel Rickless.In harmful indirect agency, harm comes to some victims in order to achieve a good, but nothing in that way is intended for the victims, or what is so intended does not contribute to their harm.
It is possible to think of harmful direct agency and harmful indirect agency as two different dimensions of agency in which harm is not intended.If it turns out that some plans of action count as harmful direct agency and harmful indirect agency, this view would be supported.Consider the deliberations of public health officials who propose to put in place a vaccine program in order to protect citizens from a rapidly spreading, highly contagious, and invariably lethal disease.If the program is carried out, about one in ten thousand vaccine recipients will experience adverse effects from the vaccine that will prove fatal, and the officials have no way to screen them and exclude them from receiving.This might seem to be a case of indirect agency, as Double Effect is designed to explain why they may proceed with the vaccination program despite these foreseeable, regretted, and unpreventable side effects of promoting a good end.If the officials desire to bring about herd immunity leads them to advocate a widespread program with incentives for participation or even mandatory participation, it will be true that harm comes to some victims that they have deliberately involved.They would be making their actions in promoting the program a case of direct agency.If the vaccine recipients willingly assume the risk of experiencing adverse effects, then a full description of the program must be considered by their own agency.These examples suggest that the Double Effect may involve many different dimensions of agency rather than a single one.
Critics of the principle of double effect claim that the pattern of justification used in these cases has some shared conditions: the agent acts in order to promote a good end, shows adequate respect for the value of human life in so acting, and has attempted to avoid or minimize the harm in question.Further substantive considerations that are not derived from the contrast between intention and foresight or the difference between direct and indirect agency are what the justification for causing the harm in question depends on.
Some argue that the appeal of the principle of double effect is illusory because an agent's intentions are not relevant to the permissibility of an action.The book by Scanlon is published in 2008.That an agent intended to bring about a certain harm doesn't explain why the action was impermissible, but it can explain what is morally faulty about the agent's reasoning in pursuing that line of action
The principle of double effect is often mentioned in discussions of what is known as palliative care, medical care for patients with terminal illness in need of pain relief.There are three assumptions in the background of these discussions.
Double effect seems to provide at least part of a justification for administering drugs to relieve pain.
The first assumption is false.A review of a large number of studies supports the claim that the use of opioids for pain relief can lead to death.There is no research to back up the claim that the drugs are likely to depress respiration.Susan Anderson Fohr concludes in a survey that there is no debate among specialists about the issue of pain control.Respiratory depression from opioids is a rarely occurring side effect.It is counter to the experience of physicians with the most experience in this area that there is a mistaken belief that pain relief will have the side effect of hastening death.
The conclusion is that double effect is not a factor in justifying the use of drugs for pain relief.If double effect's application rests on a medical myth, why is it so frequently mentioned in discussions of pain relief?There are two possible sources for the popularity and intuitive appeal of this illustration.The point of mentioning the permissible hastening of death as a merely foreseen side effect is to contrast it with what is deemed morally impermissible: administering drugs that are not pain killers to a patient with a terminal illness in order to shorten their lives.The compassionate thought behind the second assumption is that the hastening of death may be a welcome side effect of administering pain relief to patients at the end of life.Double Effect may not apply if death is not seen as a harm in the course of treating a dying patient.
In the context of end of life care in which the patient is not dying, the assumption that the hastening of death is a welcome result may be paternalistic.Patients receiving palliative care who can be adequately treated with opiate drugs may want more days, hours or minutes of life.It is unjust to assume that the hastening of death is a form of relief for patients with terminal illnesses and not a side effect to be minimized.The most plausible double effect would require agents to seek to minimize or avoid the harms that they cause.The most defensible version of the principle may be different from popular understandings of double effect.
Double effect was invoked by some members of the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the administration of pain-relieving drugs to patients receiving palliative care and the practice of terminal sedation for patients with intractable and untreatable pain.v. Quill et al.The movie 2293 was released in 1997.If hydration and nutrition are not provided, death may be hastened.The time of death may not be affected by hydration and nutrition being absent.The principle of double effect requires that the harmful side effect be minimized in order to justify withholding hydration and nutrition in cases where death is not imminent.The decision to not give hydration and nutrition to a patient who has been snoozing is dependent on whether death would be a harm to the patient.The principle of double effect does not apply when there is no harm to cause a person's death.
Terminal or full sedation is used to relieve pain in patients with terminal illness.If death is not imminent, a set of conditions (sedation, unconsciousness, the absence of hydration and nutrition) might have the effect of hastening death.These conditions make death inevitable.There are moral issues concerning this practice.Is terminal sedation appropriate if it is necessary to relieve intractable pain in patients with a terminal illness even if death is not imminent?Cellarius calls it early terminal sedation because it doesn't meet the requirement that death is imminent that is typically cited as a condition of permissibility.It is expected that early terminal sedation will speed death as a side effect of providing palliative care.There is a moral significance to the fact that death is inevitable either because it was imminent already or because of the withholding of nutrition and hydration.Is it possible to increase the level of sedation in order to make the death more likely?The principle of double effect is based on the assumption that the death of an innocent human being will not be intentionally brought about.The assumptions that inform the popular understanding of double effect are that the physician's guiding intention is to relieve pain, and that this course of action should be distinguished from a case of active euthanasia that is not prompted.To view the principle of double effect as a clear guideline, it may obscure discussion of these situations.In this discussion, the principle of double effect may be used to announce moral constraints on decisions that cause death regretfully, rather than as a way of determining the precise content of those decisions and the judgments that justify them.
Saint Thomas, consequentialism, doing vs. allowing harm, and voluntary suicide.