Doing, Allowing, and Enabling Harm: An Empirical Investigation

Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents enable harm. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence to support the claim that some important cases in the moral philosophical literature are best viewed as instances of enabling harm rather than doing or allowing harm. We also present evidence that enabling harm is regarded as normatively distinct from doing and allowing harm when it comes to assigning compensatory responsibility. Moral philosophers should be exploring the tripartite distinction between doing harm, allowing harm, and enabling harm, rather than simply the traditional bipartite distinction. Cognitive scientists and psychologists * We have benefitted from discussions of earlier versions of this paper with members of the Experimental Philosophy Lab at Yale, the Yale Global Justice Program, and participants in the Workshop on Enabling Harm at the University of Oslo in June 2012. The authors are grateful for comments on this paper that we received from Steve Guglielmo, Mark Sheskin, Brent Strickland, and three anonymous reviewers, and especially to Joshua Knobe and Tania Lombrozo for their detailed comments on successive written drafts. We would also like to thank Kevin Callender and Elizabeth Roberto for their assistance with the statistical analyses used in the paper. Barry, Lindauer, and Øverland are full joint authors of the paper. The theoretical aspects of the doing-allowing-enabling harm distinction are based on Barry and Øverland’s previous and forthcoming work. Lindauer had the primary role in conducting the experiments and positioning the paper in relation to cognitive scientific and psychological research.