Death is often placed among the worse things to befall a human. What
responsibility one might bear for bringing about death is, as a result, an important
ethical question. Indeed the right to life is often regarded as the bedrock upon
which all other rights of persons are supported.1 This right to life is often thought
to be a negative right—a right of non-interference—a right, more or less, not to be
killed.2 Additionally, many philosophers defend the Equivalence Thesis, according
to which the bare difference between doing and allowing makes no moral
difference. In the case of death, the Equivalence Thesis implies that a killing is not
by that very fact at all morally worse (or better) than an allowing to die. Both the
Equivalence Thesis and the view that the right to life is a negative right are
plausible enough individually. In this paper, I argue that their conjunction implies
an implausible (and generally unrecognized) third claim. Some doings (killings)
will be morally equivalent to some allowings (lettings die) despite the facts that
the killing will violate the right to life, the letting die will not, and these facts will
be the only differences between the cases. In other words, defenders of these claims
seem committed to the claim that violating one’s right to life is morally irrelevant
to the wrongness of the actions in question. That is simply implausible.
