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Killing And Letting Die Analysis

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The film Never Let Me Go presents a story which a group of clones were born to donate their organs to save patients who needed transplant. They then died after a few times of donations. The case to me is that society in the film ‘killed’ some clones in order not to ‘let’ some people die. In this paper, I would like to reject that killing and letting die are morally equivalent and argue that killing is worse due to some distinctions between the two. James Rachels is one of the philosophers who think that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die. He uses the contrast strategy to convince the others. He provides a famous thought experiment about this topic. Smith is someone who drowns his nephew when he is bathing. While Jones …show more content…

According to Will Cartwright’s “Killing and letting die: a defensible distinction”, ‘we have duties not to harm others which require restraint from us and may therefore be designed as negative duties. We have duties to help others which require intervention from us and may therefore be designed as positive duties. These duties are different in both scope and force.’ Our negative duty, which is not killing is owed to all others since we are capable to avoid it. However, to consider our positive duty, it is not possible for us to offer assistance to everyone in need and stop all the people from dying. So this duty is hard to fulfill as it is circumscribed and selective. Even when the two duties clash, like the John and Mary example, we can only help Mary by killing John, the negative duty is probably to take precedence. This is also an explanation of why killing is morally worse than letting die, killing is ‘a breach of negative duty’ and letting die is ‘a breach of positive duty’. If we let someone die, that person is no worse off for our presence than absence but has a possibility to live due to our presence. So fail to save the person do not worsen his situation. However, if we kill a person, his situation is undoubtedly worse for our

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