In moral philosophy, the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) holds that it is always morally worse to do harm than to allow that same harm to occur. But this doesn't seem obvious to me. Is it always possible to draw a line between doing harm and allowing harm?
Are doing harm and allowing harm equivalent?
“What it looks like is when you see somebody actively harm another person that triggers a strong automatic response,” said Brown University psychologist Fiery Cushman. “You don’t have to think very deliberatively about it. You just perceive it as morally wrong. When a person allows harm that they could easily prevent, that actually requires more carefully controlled deliberative thinking [to view as wrong].”
In a study published in advance online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Cushman and his co-authors presented 35 volunteers with 24 moral dilemmas and lapses like the one involving the figure skaters. For specific lengths of time the volunteers would read an introduction to the incident, a description of the character’s moral choices, and a description of how the character behaved. Then they’d rate the moral wrongness of the behavior on a scale from 1 to 5. All the while, Cushman and his co-authors, who were at Harvard University at the time, tracked the blood flow in the volunteers’ brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.
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https://news.brown.edu/articles/2011/12/moralilty
Are you talking about omission bias...?
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers.htm/vac.html
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers/obias.pdf
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers.htm/ocreg.html
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers/plm.pdf
Approaching your question as an invitation to a thought-experiment: it should even be possible to imagine a case where allowing harm is worse than doing harm. E.g. harming someone secretly and undetectedly might not have the deleterious ramifications that allowing a similar albeit unconcealed harming might have. Sometimes consequences do make a moral difference.
Doing harm is NOT always worse than allowing harm. For it is unequivocally the case that there can be instances when allowing a harm requires a level of moral callousness that is very much on a par with doing harm.
If "doing" is a deliberate action and "allowing" is tolerating something bad for a greater good, obviously it is always worse to do evil than to allow it.
At the end of the day we should ask what are the consequences of our acts. If a person dies because we push her or because we do not do nothing to rescue her, morally, there is no difference. The law usually marks a difference (killing is prohibited but letting die may be not). Morally, however, there is no difference as the outcome is the same.
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