Jonathan Glover sur la doctrine des actes et omissions: une autre responsabilité négative.

In Causing Death and Saving Lives, Jonathan Glover makes the critique of the doctrine of acts and omissions the cornerstone of his positions in applied ethics. How can it be argued that an act and an omission, when they lead to exactly the same consequences, are given a different moral value? This article seeks to show that to refuse the doctrine of acts and omissions is to adopt the utilitarian notion of negative responsibility. Developed in particular by Peter Singer, whose professor Glover was at the end of the 1960s, the idea of negative responsibility implies that a moral agent is responsible not only for what he does, but also for what he does not do, precisely because he has failed to act. The refutation of the doctrine of acts and omissions leads Glover to the same conclusions as the defenders of negative responsibility. On the basis of this intuition, I will try to show that the opposition between negative responsibility and the doctrine of acts and omissions constitutes in fact the core of the opposition between consequentialism and deontology: each would be the fundamental meta-ethical principle. However, I will also try to argue that negative responsibility and the doctrine of acts and omissions are not perfectly symmetrical. At the end of this article, negative responsibility will still be far from being definitively established, as its implications remain problematic, but it will emerge stronger from the comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]