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Is Euthanasia Wrong?
III
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Winston Nesbitt: “Is Killing No Worse than
Letting Die? ”
Nesbitt’s Project
• Nesbitt argues that the examples employed by Rachels (and
Michael Tooley) to show that killing is no worse than letting
die are faulty, and that, in fact, killing is worse than letting die.
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The “Difference Thesis”:
• There is a moral difference between killing and letting die: it
is morally worse to kill someone than to let them die.
• It seems that common moral intuitions favor the Difference
Thesis.
• Consider two cases:
 Case 1: I push someone who I know cannot swim
into the river, thereby killing her.
 Case 2: I come across someone who is drowning,
and who I could easily rescue, yet fail to do so,
thereby letting her die.
• It seems that my behavior is morally worse in the first
case than the second.
• We assume some malicious motive in the first case, but
perhaps only fear or indifference in the second.
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The “Difference Thesis”
• James Rachels and Michael Tooley argue that we favor the
Difference Thesis because most cases are not adequately
set up.
• Tooley: Besides motives, there are other morally relevant
differences between typical acts of killing and typical acts of
failing to save which make us judge such cases differently.
i. Typically, saving someone requires more effort than
refraining from killing someone.
ii. An act of killing necessarily results in someone’s death,
but an act of failing to save does not (someone else may
come to the rescue).
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The “Difference Thesis”
• Tooley concludes that if one wishes to appeal to intuitions,
“one must be careful to confine one’s attention to pairs of
cases that do not differ in these, or other significant
respects.”
• Rachels & Tooley: When we compare a case of killing with
one which differs from it only in being a case of letting die, we
will agree that either agent is as culpable as the other.
• We tend to think killing is worse than letting die because
we tend to think of cases that differ in other morally
relevant respects.
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Rachels’ Smith and Jones Cases:
• Recall: Both Smith and Jones stand to gain if their respective
six-year-old cousins die.
• Smith sneaks in while his cousin is bathing, and drowns him
in the tub.
• Jones is planning to do the same, but sneaks in to find his
cousin drowning all on his own. He stands
ready to drown the child if need be, but the
child drowns without Jones having
to lift a finger.
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Rachels’ Smith and Jones Cases:
• Rachels assumes that we will agree that Smith, who kills his
nephew, is no worse, morally speaking, than Jones, who
merely lets his nephew die.
• Rachels argues that if letting die were in itself less bad than
killing, Jones’ defense that “I didn’t kill him; I only let him die”
would carry some weight.
• So we conclude that Jones is just as reprehensible as Smith.
• But what is the ground of our judgment of the agent in each
case?
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Rachels’ Smith and Jones Cases:
• Note that Jones was perfectly prepared to kill his nephew,
and would have done so had it proved necessary.
• “[S]omeone who is fully prepared to perform a reprehensible
action, in the expectation of certain circumstances, but does
not do so because the expected circumstances do not
eventuate, is just as reprehensible as someone who actually
performs that action in those circumstances.” (49)
• To think otherwise would seem to place some moral value on
one person having opportunity or luck and the other not.
• We should judge Jones just as harshly as Smith, given what
he was prepared to do, even if he had not let his nephew die.
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Rachels’ Smith and Jones Cases:
• Modified Jones Case: Jones manages to slip and fall and
knock himself unconscious before he can drown the child,
which he is attempting to do.
• By the time he regains consciousness, the child (unaware of
Jones’ intentions) manages to call his parents, and Jones’
opportunity is gone.
• Here, Jones neither kills his nephew nor lets him die, but “it
would be agreed that given his preparedness to kill the child
for personal gain, he is as reprehensible as Smith.” (49)
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Tooley’s Smith and Jones Cases:
• Case 1: Jones wants Smith dead, and shoots him.
• Case 2: Jones is about to shoot Smith, when he sees that
Smith will be killed by a bomb unless Jones warns him, as he
easily can.
• Jones does not warn Smith, and the bomb explodes,
killing Smith.
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Tooley’s Homicidal Sons Case:
• Two sons are looking forward to the death of their wealthy
father, and independently decide to poison him.
• Son #1 puts poison in his father’s whiskey, and is discovered
doing so by Son #2, who was just about to do the same.
• Son #2 allows his father to drink the poisoned whiskey, and
refrains from giving him the antidote, which he happens to
possess.
• Tooley says that the agent who
kills is morally no worse than the
one who lets his victim die.
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Revisiting the Cases:
• We judge Jones to be just as reprehensible as if he had
killed Smith, but since he was fully prepared to kill him had
he not been saved the trouble by the bomb, we should make
the same judgment even if he had neither killed Smith nor let
him die (say, if both the bomb and the bullet were duds).
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Revisiting the Cases:
• With the homicidal sons, the son who didn’t kill was prepared
to do so, and given this, would be as reprehensible as the
other even if he had not “let his father die” (say, if he did not
have the antidote).
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Revisiting the Cases:
• Both Rachels and Tooley overlook that what determines
whether or not someone is reprehensible is not simply what
he does, but what he is prepared to do.
• While Rachels is correct that we will be inclined to judge
Smith and Jones equally harshly, it is because they were
both prepared to kill for motives of personal gain.
• The same is true of Tooley’s examples.
• In their efforts to ensure that each person in their cases does
not differ in any morally relevant way, they make the agents
too similar: each agent is guilty of the same moral offense.
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Revisiting the Cases:
• What modifications do Rachels’ and Tooley’s cases require if
they are to be used to legitimately gauge our attitudes
towards killing and letting die?
 With Rachels’ case of Smith & Jones, we must
remove Jones’ being prepared to kill the child: it must
be the case that, though Jones was prepared to let
his nephew die, he was not prepared to kill the child.
 It further cannot be the case that he is not prepared
to kill the child because he fears punishment, or that
he is too lazy, or that the idea simply hadn’t occurred
to him.
 Rather, he must be reprehensible enough to let the
child die for his gain, but not enough to kill the child.
• With these modifications, Smith’s behavior is, indeed, morally
worse than Jones’.
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The Social Argument:
• The reason we have morality is to make it possible for people
to live together in reasonable peace and security.
• It is clearly preferable to have (modified) Jones-like people
around than Smith-like people: we are threatened by the
latter, but not by the former.
• This is why killing is, indeed, morally worse than letting die.
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Back to Euthanasia:
• Nesbitt does not reconnect the killing/letting die distinction
back to Rachels’ central topic of interest: euthanasia.
• If killing is, indeed, worse than letting die, would active
euthanasia thereby necessarily be worse than passive
euthanasia?
• If Nesbitt’s larger social theory about morality is correct,
does it back up the idea that active euthanasia is worse
than passive euthanasia?