A powerful argument against the counterfactual comparative account of harm is that it cannot distinguish harming from failing to benefit. In reply to this problem, I suggest a new account of harm. The account is a counterfactual comparative one, but it counts as harms only those events that make a person occupy his level of well-being at the world at which the event occurs. This account distinguishes harming from failing to benefit in a way that accommodates our intuitions about the (...) standard problem cases. In laying the groundwork for this account, I also demonstrate that rival accounts of harm are able to distinguish harming from failing to benefit only if, and because, they also appeal to the distinction between making upshots happen and allowing upshots to happen. One important implication of my discussion is that preserving the moral asymmetry between harming and failing to benefit requires a commitment to the existence of a metaphysical and moral distinction between making and allowing. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or harm individuals only at fusions of moments in (...) time. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the timing problem for deprivationism because it locates death’s badness at the same time as both the victim of death and death itself, and it accounts for all of the ways that death is bad for a person. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the problem of temporally locating the benefit of future and past-directed desires because it respects several attractive principles, including the view that the intrinsic value of a time for someone is determined solely by states of affairs that obtain at that time and the view that intrinsically beneficial events benefit a person when they occur. (shrink)

There is a significant debate over the moral status of human embryos. This debate has important implications for practices like abortion and IVF. Some argue that embryos have the same moral status as infants, children, and adults. However, critics claim that the frequency of pregnancy loss/miscarriage/spontaneous abortion shows a moral inconsistency in this view. One line of criticism is that those who know the facts about pregnancy loss and nevertheless attempt to conceive children are willing to sacrifice embryos lost for (...) the healthy children they ultimately have. I respond to this criticism and argue that on the most plausible accounts of well-being, these embryos are not made worse off and thus not “sacrifices.” I then make some more general remarks about what people’s typical views about pregnancy loss show about their views toward the moral status of embryos. (shrink)

A popular view of harming is the causal account (CA), on which harming is causing harm. CA has several attractive features. In particular, it appears well equipped to deal with the most important problems for its main competitor, the counterfactual comparative account (CCA). However, we argue that, despite its advantages, CA is ultimately an unacceptable theory of harming. Indeed, while CA avoids several counterexamples to CCA, it is vulnerable to close variants of some of the problems that beset CCA.

A central claim in abortion ethics is what might be called the Harm Claim – the claim that abortion harms the fetus. In this article, we put forward a simple and straightforward reason to reject the Harm Claim. Rather than invoking controversial assumptions about personal identity, or some nonstandard account of harm, as many other critics of the Harm Claim have done, we suggest that the aborted fetus cannot be harmed for the simple reason that it does not occupy any (...) well-being level. (shrink)

On a view most secularists accept, the deceased individual goes out of existence. How, then, can death be a bad thing for, or harm, the deceased? I consider the doctrine of subsequentism, according to which the bad thing for the deceased, or the harm of death to the deceased, takes place after he or she has died. The main puzzle for this view is to explain how we can predicate a property at a time (such as having a misfortune or (...) being harmed) to an individual who does not exist at that time. This is the Problem of Predication. I consider alternative attempts to solve this puzzle, including one suggested by Ben Bradley, and I argue that they do not succeed. I go on to provide a new way of addressing the Problem of Predication and thus defending subsequentism against this specific threat, contrasting my approach with others currently on offer. (shrink)

David Boonin argues that in a choice between creating a person whose life would be well worth living and creating a different person whose life would be significantly worse, but still worth living, each option is morally permissible. I show that Boonin's argument for this view problematically implies that in a choice between creating a person whose life would be well worth living and creating another person whose life would not be worth living, each option is also morally permissible.

A central claim in abortion ethics is what might be called the Harm Claim – the claim that abortion harms the fetus. In this article, we put forward a simple and straightforward reason to reject the Harm Claim. Rather than invoking controversial assumptions about personal identity, or some nonstandard account of harm, as many other critics of the Harm Claim have done, we suggest that the aborted fetus cannot be harmed for the simple reason that it does not occupy any (...) well-being level. (shrink)