[annalex]

In all your recent examples both the harm and the benefit accrue to the same person, as well as perhaps another: the child pushed out of the way is the same child protected from the psychological scar of causing injury (plus, of course, the other child is protected from the injury itself); the other two are exactly the same person getting both sides of the double effect.

I do not see how injuring a woman before her death in the fire is intrinsically good or neutral. It is intrinsically a moral bad.

It is only the huge imbalance between the injury: merely a broken bone a minute before painful death and the good: the rescue of a child from the fire that obscures the analysis.

Remember there are three components to invincible double effect:

1. Intrinsic nature of the act is good or neutral.
2. Intent is good.
3. Harm is outweighed by the good.

In your principal example, (1) is lacking. If the firefighter pushed her out of the way of the fire, but caused an injury, that would be an intrinsic good like in your three recent examples, but that was not your original case. If he pushed her around while still unable to remove her from the fire, that would be intrinsically neutral. But he, a firefighter capable of evaluating the odds, injures her; injuring people is intrinsically bad.

Yes, I have children and understand the realism of the three recent examples. I also still remember nearly poking the eye of my play-fencing childhood mate and shudder at the thought.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I get what you're saying, but where we differ is on "What is the intrinsic nature of the act? Is it good, neutral, or bad?"

In this case, removal of the woman from the door entry is precisely what is intended, and it is intrinsically neutral. Injury is what you do not want, and try (within the limits of the possible) to prevent or mitigate, and therefore is not intended.

Injuring her is not desired, neither as the means nor as the end. It is a separate thing from removing her from the door entry area, which is a neutral act. "Injure the woman" was never part of the plan.

If you push her away and --- despite the mattresses --- she hits hard and breaks her collarbone, that was foreseeable but unintended. It formed no part of what you desired to accomplish, neither as a means nor as an end.

I would say that a result you absolutely do not want, and tried to prevent or mitigate, cannot be said to be "intended."

It's somewhat like an ectopic pregnancy situation. You're not intending the death of the human embryo; that's not what you desired to accomplish. You intend the removal of the life-threatening condition. IF you could remove that embryo and get it to reimplant someplace else -- in the mother's uterus, or in some artificial gestational system -- you would be morally obliged to do so. But if you can't, you can't.

You still remove the embryo: its removal is precisely what is intended,; but its removal causes an unintended harm. Avoiding the harm, or even saving its life was not, in any case, possible. That which is impossible cannot be morally obligatory.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Elizabeth Anscombe (whose name I tremble to invoke!) took a notoriously hard line on "intent" --- harder, I think, than the majority of Catholic ethicists in the Natural Law tradition. As I understand it, her view was that you can't claim "no intent" unless you can honestly say, "I didn't know I was doing that."

Come to think of it, that would make it very hard to justify the removal of an ectopic pregnancy; and as far as I know, she raised no moral objection to the embryo and tube removal. Yet one can't imagine this conversation: "You harmed a living embryo!" "I didn't know I was doing that.")

It applies, I think, to my example, in this way. Say you pushed the woman off the stairs and she ruptures her pancreas and collapses a lung. You could honestly say, "I didn't know I was doing that." Or say she suffers a broken ankle. "We did what we could to prevent broken bones." Or say she lands in precisely such a way that she crashes onto a sofa without injury to herself. "Thank God, that's just what we were hoping for." Any and all of these phrases could show lack of harmful intent.

Compare the situation where they try to lift her (rather than just roll her off the stairs) and, pulling hard on her arms, they dislocate her shoulders and tear ligaments. In this case even though they knew there was a risk of doing that, I would say there still was not intent. "We didn't know we were doing that." "It's sure not what we were aiming for. We were just trying to remove her."