Abstract

The Doctrine of the Double Effect is generally associated with Catholic moral theology, and is rarely more than touched on by philosophers. And when philosophers do discuss it, little effort is made to understand it or to take seriously the theological literature. ;As I understand the Doctrine, its essence is contained in the Will Principle, according to which the rightness of an action having some evil effects is determined, at least in part, by the relation between the evil effects and the agent's will. Traditional formulations of the Doctrine can be seen as efforts to answer the question: which relations between evil and the agent's will are morally significant, and how? Briefly, the Doctrine answers this question as follows. There are two morally significant relations between evil and the agent's will, one a closer relation, which can be called "direct willing," and one a more distant relation, which can be called "indirect willing." One directly wills evil when and only when one wills it as end or as means, and one indirectly wills evil when and only when one wills it as side effect. It is never permissible to directly will evil, but it is permissible to indirectly will evil if and only if there is what is usually called "proportionate reason," which is generally taken to involve a teleological weighing of goods and evils. ;Ultimately, I argue that the Doctrine is mistaken. My attack has two parts. First, I construct a variety of counterexamples to the claim that the direct/indirect distinction is morally significant, and then I argue that the Doctrine's fundamental claim embodied in the Will Principle, that the rightness of an action is determined by the relation between the evil produced by the action and the agent's will, is mistaken. Such relations have moral significance, but they are relevant not to the rightness of actions, but rather to the goodness of agents and actions. The distinction between the rightness-evaluation of acts and the goodness-evaluation of acts and agents is, I think, an important one, and proponents of the Doctrine fail to keep it straight