Michael Moore's Causation and Responsibility^ is a comprehensive and fascinating study of the relationship between the law, moralify, and metaphysics. One of the most interesting (and, at the same time, controversial) theses Moore defends in this book is the claim that some central legal concepts are grounded in metaphysical concepts. In particular, Moore emphasizes the key role played in the l...

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. ...

Psychiatric patients may try (or express a desire) to injure themselves in hospital in order to cope with overwhelming emotional pain. Some health care practitioners and patients propose allowing a controlled amount of self-injury to occur in inpatient facilities, so as to prevent escalation of distress. Is this approach an example of professional assistance with harm? Or, is the approach more ...