PHIL 150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Thought Experiment, Negative And Positive Rights
Document Summary
Foot argues that there is an important difference between killing and letting die. She argues for this by developing thought experiments and probing our moral intuitions. When a philosopher describes imagined cases and asks what would be true in it. Moral intuition: our non-theoretical, considered judgment about a case. Doing and allowing: foot wants to argue there is an important moral distinction between what we actively do and what we merely allow to happen. She accepts personal responsibility and rejects negative responsibility. Neutral responsibility-an agent is just as responsible for things they allow or fail to prevent, as they are for things they actively do. Personal responsibility: you are especially responsible for things you actively do. They some how constitute who you are as an agent. Rescue i and rescue ii: according to foot, the action in i is permissible. It is permissible to let one die to save five.
