 Warren Quinn (1989) shares Foot’s view that the doing/allowing distinction rests on the difference between positive and negative rights, but offers both an alternative analysis and a deeper defense of the claim that negative rights are stronger than positive rights. While Foot argues that these is no necessary connection between action and doing or inaction and mere allowing, Quinn treats the action/inaction distinction as fundamental to the analysis of the doing/allowing distinction. On Quinn’s view, an agent is positively relevant to a harmful upshot when his most direct contribution to the harm is an action, whether his own or that of some  object.[14]  His relevance is negative when his most direct contribution is an inaction, a failure to prevent the harm. An agent’s most direct contribution to a harmful upshot of his agency is the contribution that most directly explains the harm. One contribution explains harm more directly than another if the explanatory value of the second is exhausted in the way it explains the first.