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there was no life to save. But, nonetheless, it nicely illustratesthe clash between deontological and consequentialist ethics.
    That clash is a common trope in literature. Euripides’ play, Iphigenia in Aulis , revolves around Agamemnon’s decision whether to sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. If he does so, the goddess Artemis will stop meddling with the elements and release the wind that is holding Agamemnon’s fleet in harbor, thus allowing Agamemnon’s troops to sail against the archenemy Troy and ending the threat of their mutiny. (Iphigenia eventually resolves the dilemma by sacrificing herself.)
    In The Brothers Karamazov , Dostoyevsky puts these words into his character Ivan, speaking to his brother:
Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, [one child], and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? 11
     
    The trolley problem speaks to such dilemmas. The Doctrine of Double Effect cited in trolleyology is clearly, in the jargon, nonconsequentialist, since it claims a distinction can be drawn between two acts that have identical consequences. And the DDE has several deontological siblings. Many philosophers claim that there is a distinction between negative and positive duties, between doing and allowing (killing and letting die), and between acting and omitting. Thus, Philippa Foot claims that failing to save a life by not donating to charity is not nearly as bad as actually taking a life: “We are not inclined to think that it would be no worse to murder to get money for somecomfort such as a nice winter coat than it is to keep the money back before sending a donation to Oxfam or Care.” 12
    Those who reject such distinctions tend to adopt the following strategy to discredit them. They describe a pair of cases in which the relevant distinction applies, but that are otherwise identical, and that no right-minded person could believe differ in any morally significant way.
    Thus, take the distinction between acts and omissions. We are told that some acts are worse than some omissions. Purportedly it is worse to kill than to fail to save a life. But now imagine that two men, Smith and Jones, both stand to make a fortune if their nephew dies. Smith sneaks into his bathroom one night when his nephew is taking a bath and drowns him, making it look like an accident. In the alternative case, Jones sneaks into the bathroom: he’s about to drown him when the boy slips, hits his head, and drowns on his own. Jones watches him die. It doesn’t look as if there’s a moral distinction between Smith and Jones, even though Smith acts whereas Jones merely fails to act (lets die). And we can thus conclude, runs the argument, that there is no fundamental moral difference between acts and omissions. 13
    Such examples have been seen as a powerful attack on the act-omission and related distinctions. And if the attack succeeds, it has profound repercussions: it makes us, as the moral philosopher Peter Singer believes, as guilty for knowingly failing to save life as for actually taking life. But those who want to maintain that such distinctions have moral force have a crafty response. Just because the distinction is sometimes irrelevant, they say, it doesn’t mean it’s always irrelevant. Even if we accept that Smith and Jones are equally culpable, that doesn’t prove that all acts are morally equivalent, other things being equal, to all omissions.
    This defense is taken up by American philosopher Frances Kamm. 14 The puzzle, then, is to determine when a distinction carries weight, and when it doesn’t—and that demands an explanation as to why the distinction is morally significant in some cases but not