<p>When a barrier to harm is removed and harm befalls someone, we sometimes treat this as a doing of harm, and sometimes as an allowing. The most well-developed accounts of the metaphysical details of such cases are offered by Jeff McMahan (Ethics 103(2):250-279, 1993) and Fiona Woollard (Doing and allowing harm, Oxford University Press, 2015). Despite their differences, these accounts share two features: i) they assume that an event cannot be both a doing and an allowing of harm, and ii) they explain the metaphysical status of the removal of barriers partly through reference to things that can be shared and disagreed about by agents. I argue that these features lead to contradictions in cases in which agents in fact share and disagree about the feature that satisfies (ii). The most attractive way of avoiding these contradictions is to give up (i) and to allow that events can be both doings and allowings of harm.</p>