Morality and Consequences
Tanner Lectures (
1980)
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Abstract
In this lecture I shall offer to make clear, deeply grounded,
objective sense of a certain contrast: I call it the contrast between
positive and negative instrumentality, and it shows up in ordinary
speech in remarks about what happens because a person did do
such and such, as against what happens because he did not.
The line between positive and negative instrumentality lies
fairly close to some others which are drawn by more ordinary bits
of English. For instance, the difference between positive and
negative instrumentality in someone’s dying is cousin to the
difference between killing a person and letting him die. The latter
distinction has the advantage of being already encoded in plain