Abstract

According to deontologists, morality includes constraints. These constraints are (in part) intended to cater for our moral intuitions about various cases in which an agent can prevent harm to some by seeing to it that someone (else) is harmed. I briefly argue that neither the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing nor the Doctrine of Double Effect quite match our intuitions about such cases, and suggest that our intuitions are better explained in terms of a psychological mechanism that Peter Unger has called ‘projective separating’. Furthermore, I argue that projective separating has no moral merit and that this casts some doubt on the enterprise of defending constraints.