Killing and letting die: consequence responsibility in guidance control

Area of Science:

• Moral Philosophy
• Medical Ethics
• Responsibility Theory

Background:

• The distinction between killing and letting die is a central issue in moral philosophy and medical ethics.
• Existing frameworks often struggle to provide a consistent moral evaluation of actions versus omissions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To reassess the moral difference between killing and letting die.
• To shift the analysis from permissibility to the allocation of consequence responsibility.
• To develop a unified, practice-usable standard for foreseeable-death contexts.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing Fischer and Ravizza's guidance-control framework for a two-staged responsibility analysis.
• Operationalizing consequence responsibility through a counterfactual-subtraction procedure.
• Distinguishing between consequence-particulars and consequence-universals.

Main Results:

• The framework yields patterned results where killing and letting die are moral equals if they meet the same responsibility conditions.
• Asymmetries in responsibility track ownership, reasons-responsiveness, or causal contribution, not the doing/allowing label.
• The analysis is neutral between actions and omissions.

Conclusions:

• The proposed framework offers a unified standard for evaluating responsibility in foreseeable-death contexts.
• It clarifies documentation, role delineation, and retrospective appraisal in end-of-life medicine and clinical governance.
• The study challenges the default moral privilege often afforded to omissions.