Day 29/99 — Is it worse to do harm or to allow harm you could have prevented?

Two scenarios.

You push someone into traffic. You walk past someone who has fallen into traffic.

The outcome is identical. One of them feels obviously worse. But is it — or does it just feel that way?

The intuitive answer is that doing harm is worse than allowing it. There's a difference between pulling a trigger and failing to stop someone else from pulling it. One involves your agency directly producing the outcome. The other involves your agency declining to interrupt it. That distinction feels morally significant in a way that's hard to articulate but impossible to dismiss.

But the utilitarian position doesn't care about the distinction at all. What matters is the outcome and your capacity to affect it. If you could have prevented a harm and chose not to, the result is the same as if you caused it. The person is equally dead. Your comfort with the distinction is your problem, not a moral fact.

The doing vs allowing line also gets complicated fast in practice. A doctor who withholds treatment is doing something. A bystander who watches a child drown is allowing something. But are those actually different in any meaningful moral sense — or just different in how the law treats them?

And the version that makes it personal — most harm in the world isn't caused by people actively doing terrible things. It's maintained by people who could interrupt it and don't. Wars, poverty, systemic cruelty — these run on inaction as much as action.

So is the distinction between doing and allowing real —

Or is it just the gap between guilt and comfort?