I had heard of the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy before, but never read an article from it. Recently however, after a productive discussion with my flatmates about wild animal suffering (which is also an interesting subject that you may want to read on), I got recommended Doing vs. Allowing Harm, by Frances Howard-Snyder.
Before that, I had seldom (if ever) questioned consequentialism, and certainly not recently. Regularly revising one’s beliefs is important for the aim of rational thinking, so I thought that reading about a distinction that, if relevant, would render consequentialism false, would be interesting.
The article describes several ways of distinguishing between “doing harm” acts and “allowing harm”, proposed by different authors. Each explanation has illustrating examples and breaking counter-examples, and the author dismisses them all. The conclusion is rather interesting. It is proposed that not one, but several different distinctions are associated with doing or only allowing harm is that the distinctions proposed so far are completely arbitrary, and that there seems to be no reason to