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Examples Of Foot Based On Foot Negative Duty

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Take Home Final Exam 1. Week 2 (Foot) Foot believes that her moral principle can determine the permissibility of an action while the “direct and oblique intention” in the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) “plays only a subsidiary role” (Foot, pg.6). Her moral principle distinguishes between negative and positive duties. A negative duty is an “obligation to refrain” from “killing or robbing” people (Foot, pg.5). Meanwhile, a positive duty is an obligation to aid people, such as “[looking] after children or aged parents” (Foot, pg. 5). The positive duty does not have to be necessarily “owed”, since “some acts of charity” can be optional (Foot, pg. 5). Foot then illustrates her preferred moral principle by providing the Hospital Gas example. …show more content…

6). Based on Foot’s moral principle, this is a conflict between positive and negative duties, in which the negative duties outweigh the positive duties (Foot, pg. 6). Foot deems that it is impermissible for the doctors to manufacture the medical gas since the negative duty of killing one patient via lethal fumes outweighs the positive duty of saving five patients (Foot, pg. 6). On the other hand, DDE deems it permissible since the harm of the patient exposed to the lethal gas is obliquely intended; this is because the doctors foresaw but did not intend the side effect of killing the patient when manufacturing the medical gas (Foot, pg. 6). However, Foot points out that the DDE reasoning above conflicts with her moral intuition since people are reluctant to “bring such injury for the sake of giving aid” (Foot, pg. 6). Therefore, Foot firmly believes the Hospital Gas example supports her …show more content…

757). The problem of closeness is when actions may seem to “require the intention to harm” but can be re-interpreted “ in such a way that the intention is not really the intention to harm” (Nelkin and Rickless, pg. 756). An example of the problem of closeness in the paper introduces a man wanting to keep a diamond ring he found on a cliff. However, he is accompanied by his friend, and he knows his friend also wants the diamond ring, so he pushes them off a tall cliff knowing the friend would probably die. Nevertheless, the friend miraculously survived since they fell into a bush (Nelkin and Rickless, pg. 747). This scenario is interpreted as reckless endangerment because the man “did not push his companion over in order to kill him” even though the man knew that the friend would probably die, which raises the problem of closeness (Nelkin and Rickless, pg. 747). However, if the man shoots at the friend and misses, he would be charged with attempted murder “yet the ultimate aim is the same in both cases” (Nelkin and Rickless, pg. 747). Nelkin and Rickless’s DDE-R avoids the problem of closeness by introducing the difference between harmful direct agency and harmful indirect agency (Nelkin and Rickless, pg. 757). Distinguishing between harmful direct agency and harmful indirect

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She speaks of positive duties as, “doing acts of e.g to look after children or aged parents” (380). Then she further explains that positive duties can extend such as acts of charity which are hardly said to be owed. This doctrine explains that it is morally worse to do harm than to allow that harm to occur. One example that Foot gives of a negative is the case of the steering, driver, who has a duty to refrain from injuring five men and duty to injuring one. One example of a positive duty that Foot gives is that of the hospital staff members that are faced with a scarce-drug conflict.

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Philippa Foot introduces the Trolley Problem in The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. She uses it to illustrate some terms of some use to her, such as ‘double effect’, and ‘positive-’ and ‘negative duties’. As I understand it, ‘double effect’ is an originally-Catholic term that has to do with the fact that one always intends both the ends of an action and the means to the ends: both effects are taken into consideration. However, an undesirable effect of the means to an end is also desirable in that it accomplishes an end.

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