Ambiguities in 'killing' and 'letting die'

Abstract

In a recent article Carla Kary (1980) attempts to show that there can be a significant moral difference between instances of killing and letting die. I shall maintain in Section I that Kary's argument is somewhat weakened by her failure to note an important ambiguity in the notion of killing a person. I shall also argue in Section II that a similar ambiguity affects the notion of letting someone die, and that failure to note this latter ambiguity also weakens the position developed by Robert Coburn (1980) with regard to defective newborns.

KIE: Atkinson analyzes two articles in the December 1980 issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, one by Carla Kary on "A moral distinction between killing and letting die," and one by Robert Coburn on "Morality and the defective newborn." He concludes that the positions of both authors are weakened by ambiguities in their conceptualization of the difference between killing and letting die.