The doing/allowing distinction plays an important role in our thinking about a number of legal issues, such as the need for criminal process protections, prohibitions on torture, the permissibility of the death penalty and so on. These are areas where, at least initially, there seem to be distinctions between harms that the state inflicts and harms that it merely allows. In this paper I will argue for the importance of the doing/allowing distinction as applied to state action. Sunstein, Holmes, Vermeule (...) and others have presented influential arguments for the claim that where the state is concerned the doing/allowing distinction has no moral significance, even if it does elsewhere. I show that these arguments can be resisted. In doing so, I defend some important distinctions and principles that help us understand the state’s role in protecting people from harm. (shrink)

For many years, moral philosophers have been debating the conceptual and moral status of the distinction between intending harm and foreseeing harm. In this paper, after surveying some of the objections to the moral significance of this distinction in general, I focus on the special case of state action, arguing that whatever reasons we have to be suspicious about the distinction's moral significance in general, we have very good reasons to believe it lacks intrinsic moral significance when applied to state (...) action. After arguing for this claim, I pursue in a preliminary way some of its implications. (shrink)