Ambiguities in 'killing' and 'letting die'.

In a recent article Carla Kary (1980) attempts to show that there can be a significant moral difference between instances of killing and letting die. I shall maintain in Section I that Kary's argument is somewhat weakened by her failure to note an important ambiguity in the notion of killing a person. I shall also argue in Section II that a similar ambiguity affects the notion of letting someone die, and that failure to note this latter ambiguity also weakens the position developed by Robert Coburn (1980) with regard to defective newborns.