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Anders_H comments on Open thread, Jun. 13 - Jun. 19, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There may be an ethically relevant distinction between a rule that tells you to avoid being the cause of bad things, and a rule that says you should cause good things to happen. However, I am not convinced that causality is relevant to this distinction. As far as I can tell, these two concepts are both about causality. We may be using words differently, do you think you could explain why you think this distinction is about causality?
In my understanding, consequentialism doesn't accept a moral distinction between sins of omission and sins of action. If a person dies whom I could have saved through some course of action, I'm just as guilty as I would be if I murdered the person. In my view, there must be a distinction between murder (=causing a death) and failure to prevent a death.
If you want to be more formal, here's a good rule. Given a death, would the death still have a occurred in a counterfactual world where the potentially-guilty person did not exist? If the answer is yes, the person is innocent. Since lots of poor people would still be dying if I didn't exist, I'm thereby exonerated of their death (phew). I still feel bad about eating meat, though.