ABSTRACT

As has been seen, the mental element for murder has been widened to include oblique or indirect intention whereby a result may be intended in certain circumstances when it is not the actor’s specific purpose to cause it, but rather when he may foresee that it is a virtually certain consequence of what he does that someone will be killed. The problematic distinction between intended and foreseen consequences is well illustrated by the principle of double effect, a ‘defence’ invoked by and for doctors, usually when increasing pain-killing medication to a suffering terminally ill patient where a possible side-effect of that increase would be to hasten the patient’s death. Such a situation thus has both a good and a bad consequence (killing the patient’s pain as against possibly killing the patient). In a case like this, it is permissible to relieve the pain, even if life is incidentally shortened,1 but killing in order to relieve pain is not permitted.