I defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing: the claim that doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. A thing does not genuinely belong to a person unless he has special authority over it. The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing protects us against harmful imposition – against the actions or needs of another intruding on what is ours. This protection is necessary for something to ge...

An influential account of moral choice suggests that one class of moral values—protected values (PVs)—rules like “do no harm” motivate a kind of rigidity in moral cognition: PV-driven choices are sensitive to the difference between doing and allowing harm, but are relatively less sensitive to the amount of harm imposed (Baron & Spranca, 1997). Related work on people’s reasoning about moral dile...

Humanitarian aid in settings of conflict has always been fraught with challenges. In the absence of political engagement, however, manipulation by state authorities, however, have the potential to pervert aid intervention to inflict harm. South Sudan exemplifies how states may abuse the humanitarian response to retreat from public responsibility, divert funds to further violence and conflict an...

Results from a qualitative study with parents about underage drinking are presented. Semistructured interviews (n = 44) were conducted with parents of teens to investigate whether and why parents permit underage drinking. Parents had three primary reasons for allowing underage drinking: deliberate, spontaneous, and harm reduction. Deliberate reasons included passing on knowledge about drinking ...

objective: self-harm was classified to show forms like non-suicidal self injury and indirect risky behaviors and drug abuse. the aims of this study were to compare suicidal tendencies indexes and difficulty in emotion regulation skills in mixed groups of adolescents with direct and indirect forms of self-harm. methods: in a casual-comparative design from population of delinquent adolescents det...

The tobacco problem can be usefully conceptualised as two problems: eliminating the most harmful forms of nicotine use (certainly cigarettes, and probably all smoked tobacco), and minimising the use and/or harms from use of lower-harm, but addictive forms of nicotine. A possible target would be to effectively eliminate use of the most harmful forms of nicotine within the next decade and then tu...

The traditional philosophical doctrines of Consequentialism, Doing and Allowing, and Double Effect prescribe that moral judgments and decisions should be based on consequences, action (as opposed to inaction), and intention. This study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how these three factors affect brain processes associated with moral judgments. We find the following: ...

In recent decades the practice of female "circumcision" has come under intense international scrutiny, often conceptualized as a violation of women's basic right to health. Although the adverse health consequences of female "circumcision" form the basis of opposition to the practice, anti-circumcision activists, as well as many international medical associations, largely oppose measures to impr...