Thoughts on 'Acts and Omissions'


May15th 1998


The next issue, Number 24, will appear on June15th 1998.





Theistic morality is simple - deceptively so. It comprises identifying the Will of God and praying for the strength to do His Will. Theist morality is essentially the morality of obedience.

Atheistic morality is deceptively complex but, if we keep our cool and don't crave certainty and do accept humbly the risk of being wrong, then the complexity is lessened. Atheist morality is all about identifying shared values that arise form our experience as social beings and, by ethical inquiry, deciding what is the morally laudable way to react to any given situation. Very often one's response to moral challenge is intuitive but, when time permits, a searching critical analysis is all to the good; indeed the habit of searching analysis serves to educate one's intuitions. Atheist morality is not the morality of obedience; it is the morality of inquiry and of inescapable personal responsibility.

The Bible - viewed atheistically as an important anthology of all-too-human writings - is ambivalent about some important areas of ethical uncertainty; those areas include the relative importance of intentions, consequences and good example in one's moral endeavours.

The widow's mite story is a thoroughgoing plea for the importance of intention and example - as against consequences; the mite was far too small to do anybody any direct good!

When Jesus reportedly said something like 'by their fruits shall ye know them' he was, it seems, pleading the case for consequentialist ethics.

When, elsewhere, Jesus teaches that one must do good in secret he is evidently discounting the value of good example. (Your act, however good it may be, cannot be a good example if nobody knows about it!) The Bible is better at raising ethical problems than it is at solving them.

A very important ethical question is not dealt with very clearly in the Bible but it is of huge practical importance, day to day. That question is to do with 'acts and omissions'; it is, notably, a central part of the euthanasia debate

The question is this:

IF an act is intended to have a particular result, and this result actually happens as intended, then that act can be compared with a deliberate omission to act having the same intended result ......... THEN, the question is: are act and omission ethically equivalent or is the act ethically more significant than the corresponding omission?

That is a very difficult question.



The question arose in the case of a man, very well known to me, who became permanently almost wholly disabled - to the extent of being unable even to raise a spoon to his mouth, unable even to speak articulately. His quality of life had almost gone. When he contracted a respiratory infection - that would have diminished life-quality to zero - the issue was three sided : - perhaps the infection could be cured and so the status quo ante could be restored; perhaps he could have been left to die untreated (the 'constructive neglect' option); perhaps he could have been given a lethal injection (the 'mercy killing' option).

Let us dismiss the first option as officious meddling effectively aimed at imposing survival upon the patient .... on the basis that even hopeless survival is intrinsically valuable. We are left with the other two - a classic 'acts and omissions' dilemma.

Some people would argue that since the act and the omission might both be similarly motivated and also identical in result ..... therefore the act and the omission are ethically equivalent and so the 'get it over with' option of lethal injection is no worse than the constructive neglect option; indeed the consequent elimination of futile suffering, achieved by mercy killing, might be held to make the lethal injection option ethically superior.

But the fact remains that to administer lethal injection is something that many people would simply not do and unless the 'constructive neglect' option is thought - however illogically - to be ethically preferable then the patient might be given all treatment needful to procure futile survival at any price.

So, pragmatically, the notion that the omission is less wrong than the act can actually reduce the patient's suffering and thus be held to be ethically laudable.

Are there possible scenarios in which the omission can truly, rather than merely pragmatically, be held to be less wrong than the corresponding act?. I think that there are such scenarios.

Suppose that I am persuaded that by giving five hundred pounds to OXFAM I can save the lives of, say, two starving children in Africa. Then, by omitting to give the money, I am being instrumental in killing two children (effectively selected at random). Suppose, to consider the corresponding act, that I go to Africa and kill, with my bare hands, the two starving children I first meet.

The omission and the act might be similarly motivated (an opinion on my part that the world is overpopulated and that, sadly, only starvation and disease will correct this) and the result - two dead children plucked out of the situation at random - might be the same. But would not almost anyone say that, in such a case, the act is far worse than the corresponding omission?

There is another aspect of the omission that is relevant, in this case, to the comparison of act and omission. If I give the money to OXFAM in order to save the children then I am ipso facto omitting to donate it to some other equally worthy cause - the same money cannot be spent twice! So some good acts necessarily entail some bad omissions of, perhaps, comparable moral weight.

The fact is that situations vary and just how an act and an omission rate, one against the other ethically speaking, varies likewise.

It seems to me to be simplistic, to the point of fanaticism, to say EITHER that an omission is always, OR is never, ethically less weighty than the act that is similarly motivated and having the same result.





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