The most exhaustive philosophical discussion of problems concerned with negative actions has been of the difference between killing and letting die. The traditional and most widely accepted view is that killing is of its very nature morally worse than letting die. R.A. The doctrine of the double effect distinguishes between what a man foresees will result from his conduct and what in the strict sense he intends. Duff, in a recent discussion of the doctrine of the double effect, does his best to rescue it as part of a coherent morality and ties it firmly to moral absolutism. Jonathan Bennett, whose intuitions told him that letting die was every bit as bad as killing, attempted, in a now well-known article, to get at ‘what difference there is between killing and letting die which might be a basis for a moral judgement’.