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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The principle of double effect does not permit a harmful act merely because the agent's ultimate aim is good and the harm was regretted rather than welcomed.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Double effect requires not only that the agent's ultimate aim is good, the proportionality condition is satisfied, and the harm is regretted and minimized.
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    • 2.Double effect additionally requires that the harm not be implicated as part of the agent's means to the good end — i.e., the harm must not be instrumentally intended.
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    • 3.Harms that are brought about as part of the agent's means to a good end may be prohibited by double effect even if those harms were produced regretfully and only for the sake of the good end.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Aquinas's distinction in Summa Theologiae II-II Q.64 grounds permissibility in the structure of the act's causal order, not merely the agent's psychological attitude toward harm.
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    • 2.An agent's regret at harm tracks affective disposition, not the rational structure of means-end reasoning that double effect's intention condition actually evaluates.
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    • 3.If regret sufficed to render harm unintended, virtually any atrocity could be licensed by a sufficiently remorseful perpetrator, collapsing the doctrine's action-guiding content entirely.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Warren Quinn's 1989 account distinguishes direct from oblique intention by whether the victim's suffering is exploited as part of the agent's operative plan, independent of the agent's emotional response to that suffering.
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    • 2.Foot's trolley problem analyses demonstrate that the impermissibility of the surgeon harvesting one patient to save five persists even when the surgeon is genuinely grief-stricken, confirming that regret cannot transform instrumental harm into mere side-effect.
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