Philippa Foot: Negative And Positive Rights

Philippa Foot, Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been studying and writing about the moral implications of killing someone versus letting someone die for many years. She also explains to us the difference between the negative and positive rights of a person and how negative rights and duties are more stringent than positive rights and duties. I shall be looking at this theory and explaining how it applies to certain cases. Before we can discuss these rights and how they apply to these situations, though, we must know what they truly mean.

Foot says that rights can be split into two kinds, negative and positive. Negative rights are described as our rights not to be interfered with or not to be harmed. For instance, we have the right not to have our property taken away. Positive rights are our rights to goods and services, such as our right to food and medical care. Corresponding to a person's negative and positive rights are other people's negative and positive duties; we have a negative duty not to harm other people and a positive duty to feed the hungry. Foot also says that we should reject the theory of Consequentialism which is a very simplistic view of what is right and wrong. In fact, that is why many people support it, because of its simplicity. Consequentialism states that all that matters to the rightness or wrongness of actions is the goodness or badness of the consequences. In simpler terms, an action is permissible or “good” if the consequences are better than any alternative available to the person committing the act. Foot, though, says that this theory is wrong because the way that these consequences are brought about is actually what can matter morally and decide whether the act is truly right or wrong.

Furthermore, we need to know how Foot’s theory of killing and letting die applies to certain situations and what she would conclude about them. The first situation, where the Judge has to choose whether or not to frame an innocent person to save five others who are being held hostage, is relatively simple to explain using Foot’s theory. It seems that if the judge framed an innocent person to take the blame for the crime that the mob wants justice for, he or she would be ignoring that person’s negative right to not be harmed and, in the same instance, would be ignoring their own negative duty not to harm other people. If nothing is done, the mob will kill the five people because the culprit of the crime was not found. This would be an example of the judge letting someone (or five people in this instance) die instead of actually killing someone. If the judge proceeded to frame the innocent person for the crime, that would be a prime example of killing someone and taking the action yourself. Arguments have been made that it is moral to save as many people as possible, but it is the way that that certain outcome would be accomplished that makes it immoral. Foot describes in her essay that “We cannot originate a fatal sequence, although we can allow one to run its course (Foot 78five).” This explains why the judge cannot originate the fatal sequence of having an innocent person hanged.

In the second situation, the previous case is changed so that a person now has the option to save five from the mob or save one from the judge, who has decided to frame an innocent person to try and save the five hostages. This situation is different from before because now it seems that, if nothing is done, all six people will die, but you have the option to save at least some of them. In the previous occurrence, the person in question was actually initiating a fatal sequence to kill someone who would, otherwise, not have died. In this incidence, if nothing is done, then all of the people will die but any action taken by the person would not create any additional fatal sequence that was not going to happen before. Although, if nothing is done, this person, who has the chance to take action and save lives, will be ignoring his or her positive duty to save them if it is possible. Assuming that all of the people are of equal importance to society, the obvious choice would be to save the five hostages. Even though the other person has done nothing wrong and deserves to live just as the other five do, it is common sense to save the most that you can; as long as you won’t endanger anyone else or initiate some sort of lethal action that would not have otherwise happened. In this situation, the choice is just to save five out of the six or save one out of the six, so five is the obvious choice, and Foot would agree.

The final situation is a little bit more complicated because it is much like the previous case where you can save