Many of us agree that we ought not to wrong future people, but there remains disagreement about which of our actions can wrong them. Can we wrong individuals whose lives are worth living by taking actions that result in their very existence? The problem of justifying an answer to this question has come to be known as the non-identity problem.[1] While the literature contains an array of strategies for solving the problem,[2] in this paper I will take what I call (...) the harm-based approach, and I will defend an account of harming—which I call the existence account of harming—that can vindicate this approach. -/- Roughly put, the harm-based approach holds that, by acting in ways that result in the existence of individuals whose lives are worth living, we can harm and thereby wrong those individuals. An initially plausible way to try to justify this approach is to endorse the non-comparative account of harming, which holds that an event harms an individual just in case it causes her to be in a bad state, such that the state’s badness does not derive from a comparison between that state and some alternative state that the individual would or could have been in. However, many philosophers argue that the non-comparative account of harming is inadequate,[3] and one might be tempted to infer from this that any harm-based approach to the non-identity problem will fail. My proposal, which I call the existence account of harming, will show that this inference is faulty: we can vindicate the harm-based approach without relying on the non-comparative account of harming. (shrink)

Epicureans believe that death cannot harm the one who dies because they hold the existence condition, which states that a subject is able to be harmed only while they exist. I show that on one reading of this condition death can, in fact, make the deceased worse off because it is satisfied by the deprivation account of death’s badness. I argue that the most plausible Epicurean view holds the antimodal existence condition, according to which no merely possible state of affairs (...) can be good or bad relative to the subject who dies. I go on to show how this condition, as well as any other condition that denies the deprivation account, results in skepticism about practical reason. Thus, the Epicurean faces a dilemma. Either our practical reasoning is hopelessly mistaken or death can make us worse off. Given that our practical reasoning seems at least mildly reliable, we should conclude that death can make us worse off. (shrink)

In “Harmful Choices, the Case of C, and Decision-Making Competence,” Pickering and colleagues advance an argument in favor of externalism, a view in which the competence of a decision maker is judged relative to factors external to their cognition. In advancing this argument, Pickering and colleagues focus on the external factor of harm: In their view, it is the harmfulness of a considered or chosen action that provides evidence against the competence of the decision maker. However, the proper identification of (...) harmful choices and outcomes remains a demanding task, largely because our understanding of what harm is remains deeply incomplete. Despite 50 years of tempestuous debate, the metaphysics of harm remains an unsettled question. The existence of such a debate does not, in and of itself, provide evidence against the externalist position; rather, it is the theories of harm themselves that pose meaningful challenges for the externalist. Our purpose, here, is to illuminate these challenges. (shrink)

This article defends the Harm Principle, commonly attributed to John Stuart Mill, against recent criticism. Some philosophers think that this principle should be rejected, because of severe difficulties with finding an account of harm to plug into it. I examine the criticism and find it unforceful. Finally, I identify a faulty assumption behind this type of criticism, namely that the Harm Principle is plausible only if there is a full-blown, and problem-free, account of harm, which proponents of the principle can (...) refer to. (shrink)

This article defends the Harm Principle, commonly attributed to John Stuart Mill, against recent criticism. Some philosophers think that this principle should be rejected, because of severe difficulties with finding an account of harm to plug into it. I examine the criticism and find it unforceful. Finally, I identify a faulty assumption behind this type of criticism, namely that the Harm Principle is plausible only if there is a full-blown, and problem-free, account of harm, which proponents of the principle can (...) refer to. (shrink)

An important objection to the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) of harm is that the account fails to cohere with standard views about the normative significance of harm. In response, some proponents of CCA suggest that the concept of harm should play a more limited role in normative theorising than philosophers might usually think. This paper addresses the most elaborate defence of CCA of this sort, namely that by Neil Feit (2019) Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 22, 809–823, and argues that (...) it is unsuccessful. (shrink)

In this paper, I construct and defend an account of harm, specifically, all-things-considered overall harm. I start with a simple comparative account, on which an event harms a person provided that she would have been better off had it not occurred. The most significant problems for this account are overdetermination and preemption cases. However, a counterfactual comparative approach of some sort is needed to make sense of harm, or so I argue. I offer a counterfactual comparative theory that accounts nicely (...) for such cases, by taking claims about harm to be, potentially, irreducibly plural. In some cases, there are some events such that they are harmful, even if no one of them is such that it is harmful. I try to work out the details. (shrink)

Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder is an influential hybrid of naturalist and normative theories. In order to conclude that a condition is a disorder, according to the HDA, one must determine both that it results from a failure of a physical or psychological mechanism to perform its natural function and that it is harmful. In a recent issue of this journal, I argued that the HDA entails implausible judgments about which disorders there are and how they are (...) individuated. The same arguments apply to other views that incorporate a harm criterion. More recently, David G. Limbaugh has modified the HDA by providing a novel account of the way in which a disorder must be harmful. Here, I briefly review the relevant issues and then critically assess Limbaugh’s account. I argue in the end that Limbaugh’s revisions do not succeed in making accounts like the HDA more attractive. (shrink)

According to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder, the inability of some internal part or mechanism to perform its natural function is necessary, but not sufficient, for disorder. HDA also requires that the part dysfunction be harmful to the individual. I consider several problems for HDA’s harm criterion in this article. Other accounts on which harm is necessary for disorder will suffer from all or almost all of these problems. Comparative accounts of harm imply that one is harmed (...) when one is made worse off, that is, worse off than one otherwise would have been. Non-comparative accounts imply that one is harmed when one is put into some kind of condition or state that is, in some way, bad in itself. I argue that whether harm is construed comparatively or non-comparatively, HDA’s harm criterion is problematic. I tentatively conclude that an analysis of medical disorder should not make use of the concept of harm. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the problem of omission for the counterfactual comparative account of harm. A given event harms a person, on this account, when it makes her worse off than she would have been if it had not occurred. The problem arises because cases in which one person merely fails to benefit another intuitively seem harmless. The account, however, seems to imply that when one person fails to benefit another, the first thereby harms the second, since the second (...) person would have been better off if the first had benefited her. I argue that the cases of failing to benefit at issue are in fact cases of harming. They are cases of preventive harm. I also argue that we can explain away the intuition that no harm occurs in these cases, and that the relevant implication of the counterfactual comparative account is consistent with a variety of plausible views about the moral significance of harm. (shrink)

The concept of “harm” is ubiquitous in moral theorising, and yet remains poorly defined. Bradley suggests that the counterfactual comparative account of harm is the most plausible account currently available, but also argues that it is fatally flawed, since it falters on the omission and pre-emption problems. Hanna attempts to defend the counterfactual comparative account of harm against both problems. In this paper, I argue that Hanna’s defence fails. I also show how his defence highlights the fact that both the (...) omission and the pre-emption problems have the same root cause – the inability of the counterfactual comparative account of harm to allow for our implicit considerations regarding well-being when assessing harm. While its purported neutrality with regard to substantive theories of well-being is one of the reasons that this account is considered to be the most plausible on offer, I will argue that this neutrality is illusory. (shrink)

In recent attempts to define ‘harm’, the most promising approach has often been thought to be the counterfactual comparative account of harm. Nevertheless, this account faces serious difficulties. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘harm’ cannot be defined without reference to a substantive theory of well-being, which is itself a fraught issue. This has led to the call for the concept to simply be dropped from the moral lexicon altogether. I reject this call, arguing that the non-comparative approach to defining (...) harm has not been sufficiently explored. I then develop such an account that avoids the difficulties faced by comparative accounts whilst not presupposing a substantive theory of well-being. I conclude that this definition renders a concept of harm that can be meaningfully employed in our moral discourse. (shrink)

This thesis takes up a rights-based perspective to discuss a number of issues related to the problem of permissible harm. It appeals to a person’s capacity to shape her life in accordance with her own ideas of the good to explain why her death can be bad for her, and why each of us should have primary say over what may be done to her. The thesis begins with an investigation of the badness of death for the person who dies. (...) If death is bad for us, this helps explain the wrongness of killing. The thesis defends the deprivation account—i.e. the idea that death is bad for us when and because it deprives us of good life—against two Epicurean challenges. It adds that death is also bad when and because it thwarts our agency. Next, the thesis deals with the logic of our moral rights to non-interference. It proposes a conception of rights according to which the stringency of our rights derives from and is justified by the rational aspect of our human nature. It argues that this conception of moral rights solves the paradox of deontology. While our rights to non-interference are stringent, they are not absolute. The thesis considers two possible exceptions to the general rule that it is impermissible to harm an innocent person against her consent. First, using an actual case from WWII, it investigates the circumstances under which a government may expose some parts of its population to an increased risk of harm in order to decrease the risk to others. Second, it considers the permissibility of self-defence against an innocent threat. It argues that the potential victim of an innocent threat has a justice-based reason to treat her own interests as on a par with those of the threat. (shrink)

Does a white philosopher have anything of value to offer to the philosophy of race and racism? If this philosophical subfield must embrace subjective experience, why should we value the perspective of white philosophers whose racial identity is often occluded by racial normativity and who lack substantive experiences of being on the receiving end of racism? Further, if we should be committed to experience, in what sense can the philosophy of race and racism be “objective”? What should that word mean?Tackling (...) this question first, “objective” should at least mean general, that the ideas of the literature can be coherently integrated. An objective take on racism brings together a plurality of perspectives. What’s wrong with just a plurality of satellite ideas? It implies a fragmented approach to ameliorating racism, where different specialists have different recommendations. How can racism, generally, be lessened? If major views of racism are unifiable, then we have a general method to ameliorate racism. This project might appear tone-deaf: a white philosopher unifying things by reducing ideas to some central notion. But this unity isn’t about reducing things but rather integrating them in a way that respects difference. Yet, there’s a reason we should be interested in the white perspective. Whites can speak about racism from a participatory perspective. If whites are knowledgeable, and believe themselves to have no implicit bias, they may suppose they’re “beyond” racism or no longer at risk for perpetuating it. I explore this idea in a psychologically realistic way via my notion of overlooking, where ameliorating racism from the white perspective is an ongoing project. I end by considering how racism is applicable to other philosophical ideas beyond its typical or circumscribed purview. Here, I re-frame responsibility, arguing that we needn’t be forced to choose between responsibility models divided into individual versus social camps. We ought to instead think of responsibility in terms of power, which provides a realistic lens by which persons and groups are held to account. In being more generally convincing, it might actually get folks to take responsibility where they might not otherwise—theory in service of praxis. (shrink)

According to the dominant account of harming, to harm an agent is to cause her to occupy a harmed state. Matthew Hanser rejects this “state-based” account, arguing that each version of it faces counterexamples. Instead, Hanser argues, to harm an agent is to cause her to suffer harm, where suffering harm is undergoing an event: in particular, it is losing or being prevented from receiving a basic good. In this thesis, I argue that this “event-based” account is, at best, a (...) version of the state-based account. The identity of any event as the suffering of a harm, I argue, derives from the fact that it causes the agent to occupy a harmed state. I then defend the “counterfactual comparative” version of the state-based account against three prominent objections. The intended upshot of my arguments is that the state-based account of harming is superior to its event-based counterpart. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the debate about ‘climate justice’, i.e. a call for a just and feasible distribution of responsibility for addressing climate change. The main argument is a proposal for a cautious, practicable, and necessary step in the right direction: given the set of theoretical and practical obstacles to climate justice, we must begin by making contemporary development practices sustainable. In times of climate change, this is done by recognising and responding to the fact that emissions of (...) greenhouse gases, with climate change as their result, are an immanent threat to any reflectively embraced development project. In the universal pursuit of progress, basic needs of both present and future people are put at risk. Even so, a political stalemate and business-as-usual prevail. The situation is locked up by an uncertainty about the exact impacts of choices made and by the reasonable disagreement of modern societies. The result is passiveness, and the passing on of a slowly and indiscernibly growing problem to future generations. This dissertation brings out a crucial message about the need to make our development sustainable. Instead of delaying action through trying to resolve the intractable epistemic and normative uncertainty fully, the focus should be on vindicating already shared points of practical convergence. On the constructivist method here adopted, the task is to characterise the agent and the situation faced from a practical and first-person point of view. More specifically, to specify the practical problem climate change gives rise to; the moral importance of needs (chapter three); how a principled priority of basic needs can be defended (chapter four), intergenerationally (chapter five) and internationally (chapter six); and what natural and social limits there are to development (chapter seven). These conceptions narrows the practice of development in the present context: it can be concluded that development must not risk the basic needs of anyone implicated. This common ground brackets off disagreement irrelevant to the urgent need to act, and so brings together otherwise deeply divided agents. A sufficientarian basic needs-principle, as the focus of an overlapping consensus, is practicable and anticipatory in the disuniting moral conundrum of climate change. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of human rights accept that all persons have human rights. Typically, ‘personhood’ is understood as unitary and binary. It is unitary because there is generally supposed to be a single threshold property required for personhood. It is binary because it is all-or-nothing: you are either a person or you are not. A difficulty with binary views is that there will typically be subjects, like children and those with dementia, who do not meet the threshold, and so who (...) are not persons with human rights, on these accounts. It is consequently unclear how we ought to treat these subjects. This is the problem of marginal cases. I argue that we cannot resolve the problem of marginal cases if we accept a unitary, binary view of personhood. Instead, I develop a new non-binary personhood account of human rights, and defend two main claims. First, there are many, scalar properties, the having of which are conducive to personhood. Second, different subjects have different human rights depending on which of these properties they have, and what threats apply to them. On my view, and contra most existing accounts, most marginal cases have some degree of personhood and are entitled to some human rights. (shrink)

Extremism about Demands is the view that morality is significantly more demanding than prevailing common-sense morality acknowledges. This view is not widely held, despite the powerful advocacy on its behalf by philosophers such as Peter Singer, Shelly Kagan, Peter Unger, and G.A. Cohen. Most philosophers have remained attracted to some version of Moderation about Demands, which holds that the behavior of typical well-off people is permissible, including the ways that such people tend to employ their economic and other resources. It (...) is difficult to resist the conclusion that proponents of Extremism have not taken sufficiently seriously the central convictions that motivate the Moderate view. -/- This dissertation offers an improved defense of Extremism about Demands. At its center is an argument that appeals dialectically to requirements of justice that Moderates themselves already implicitly accept. Specifically, I claim that any plausible set of Moderate moral principles will, when applied to a world like ours, yield demands on typical well-off people that far exceed the demands of common-sense morality. -/- My argument has two cruxes. The first is the idea that our concern for justice is at least partially grounded in a concern for individuals’ interests, broadly construed. The other is a principle that I call Injustice entails Obligations, which says that we are collectively subject to requirements of justice that, if fully complied with, would ensure the transition from current injustice to a just state of affairs. Any view that is compatible with both the interest-based view of (part of) our concern for justice and Injustice entails Obligations will, I argue, require sacrifices from typical well-off people that substantially exceed what prevailing common-sense morality requires of them. -/- Moderates typically emphasize the idea that each person has an important interest in pursuing the projects, plans, relationships, and commitments that are most important to her. But they also believe that acceptable Moderate principles will properly balance this idea with the idea that from a properly impartial perspective everyone, and everyone's interests, are equally morally important. Because Moderates accept the latter idea, they are already committed to thinking that in a just world, everyone would have a sufficient minimum share of society’s resources. I argue that even if we limit our focus to distributive justice in a single society such as the United States, and even if we assume that distributive justice requires only a sufficient minimum, the extent to which the status quo must be transformed in order for justice to be achieved is still too great to be compatible with Moderate demands on typical well-off people. -/- There are a number of ways to try to argue that Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations are compatible with Moderation about Demands. For instance, it might be argued that all or nearly all of the demands to sacrifice in order to promote justice can be assigned to the super-rich, rather than to typical well-off people. Or it might be argued that the sacrifices of a single well-off person cannot be required because they amount to a mere “drop in the bucket” relative to what needs to be done in order to fully achieve justice. I show that such arguments fail. -/- The argument that I consider in greatest detail derives from John Rawls’s view that the principles of justice apply to the institutions of the “basic structure of society,” and do not apply directly to the conduct of individuals. If this “Institutionalism” is right, then it cannot be the case that individuals are obligated to promote justice directly in the way that I suggest they are. Furthermore, it might seem that a view that assigns all of the burdens of promoting justice to the basic structure satisfies the imperative to transition from injustice to justice, since if the relevant institutions were to begin doing everything that the Rawlsian view says they ought to be doing, the requirements of justice would be met. I argue, however, that there is no understanding of Institutionalism on which it is itself consistent with the following desiderata: Moderate principles, and the associated interest-based view of (part of) the ground of our concern for justice; Injustice entails Obligations; and Moderate demands. So, Institutionalism cannot make Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations compatible with Moderate demands. -/- Moderate principles and Injustice entails Obligations, then, remain incompatible with Moderation about Demands. Since there are compelling reasons to accept both Moderate principles and In justice entails Obligations, I conclude that we must reject Moderation about Demands. The obligations that justice places on typical well-off people are substantially more extensive than is acknowledged by prevailing common-sense morality. (shrink)

This thesis in an invistigation into the concept of "harm" and its moral relevance. A common view is that an analysis of harm should include a counterfactual condition: an act harms a person iff it makes that person worse off. A common objection to the moral relevance of harm, thus understood, is the non-identity problem. -/- This thesis criticises the counterfactual condition, argues for an alternative analysis and that harm plays two important normative roles. -/- The main ground for rejecting (...) the counterfactual condition is that it has unacceptable consequences in cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. Several modifications to the condition are considered but all fail to solve this problem. -/- According to the alternative analysis to do harm is to perform an act which is responsible for the obtaining of a state of affairs which makes a person’s life go worse. It is argued that should be understood in terms of counterfactual dependence. This claim is defended against counterexamples based on redundant causation. An analysis of is also provided using the notion of a well-being function. It is argued that by introducing this notion it is possible to analyse contributive value without making use of counterfactual comparisons and to solve the non-identity problem. -/- Regarding the normative importance of harm, a popular intuition is that there is an asymmetry in our obligations to future people: that a person would have a life worth living were she to exist is not a reason in favour of creating that person while that a person would have a life not worth living is a reason against creating that person. It is argued that the asymmetry can be classified as a moral option grounded in autonomy. Central to this defence is the suggestion that harm is relevant to understanding autonomy. Autonomy involves partly the freedom to pursue one’s own aims as long as one does no harm. (shrink)

In this work, I will support a combined notion of harm according to which there are qualitatively different harms. I will support a way in which the severity of harms could be measured. Then, I will provide three principles about the strength of the reasons against harming. The supported thesis will provide some tools to solve some problems of the general part of criminal law. In relation to the analytical stratum of statutory description of an offence, I will show that (...) the defended notion of harm could help to solve cases of hypothetical and alternative causal courses. In relation to the analytical stratum of unlawfulness (or wrongfulness), I will show that the proposed ranking of the severity of harms help us to distinguish between cases of necessity as justification and necessity as excuse. In relation to the analytical stratum of culpability, I will show that the principles regarding the strength of the reasons against harming help us to supply straightforward criteria to measure the punishment to impose for having committed some crime. -/- En este trabajo intentaré defender una noción combinada de daño de acuerdo a la cual existen dos tipos de daños cualitativamente diferentes. Asimismo, defenderé un modo en que la gravedad de los diferentes daños puede ser graduada. Derivado de lo anterior, extraeré tres principios sobre la fuerza de las razones en contra de dañar. La tesis defendida proporcionará herramientas para resolver algunos problemas de la parte general de derecho penal. En relación al tipo penal, mostraré que la noción de daño defendida puede ayudar a resolver casos de cursos causales alternativos e hipotéticos. En referencia a la antijuridicidad, mostraré que la clasificación de la gravedad de los daños propuesta ayuda a distinguir qué casos de estado de necesidad deben considerarse como justificación y cuales como excusa. En referencia a la culpabilidad, mostraré que los principios sobre la diferente fuerza de las razones en contra de dañar ayudan a aportar criterios claros para la individualización de la pena a imponer por la comisión de un delito. (shrink)

Although the counterfactual comparative account of harm, according to which someone is harmed when things go worse for her than they otherwise would have, is intuitively plausible, it has recently come under attack. There are five serious objections in the literature: some philosophers argue that the counterfactual account makes it hard to see how we could harm someone in the course of benefitting that person; others argue that Parfit’s non-identity problem is particularly problematic; another objection claims that the account forces (...) us to see many harms where there is just one; a fourth objection is based on the claim that the counterfactual account makes mysterious the distinction between harms and mere failures-to-benefit; and a final problem arises from cases of pre-emption, in which the nearest possible world in which the harmful event does not occur is a world in which some other harmful event occurs. This paper argues that, properly understood, harm essentially involves a counterfactual comparison, and that these comparisons are sensitive to context in the manner typical of counterfactual conditionals, and that, augmented with two plausible distinctions, this account has the resources to provide satisfying responses to each of the objections that have been raised against it. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to analyse the meaning of harm as well as the strength of the reasons against harming provided by harm-states. I will argue that there are two kinds of harms: absolute harms and relative harms. Also, I will argue that when certain harm has been completely covered by considering such harm as absolute, the consideration of such harm as –also– relative is displaced. Such considerations should be taken into account when the suffered harms cannot be entirely (...) explained by considerations regarding absolute harms. If these claims are right, we will have guidelines to measure, among other things, the agent´s moral responsibility in different kind of cases. -/- En este trabajo me propongo analizar tanto qué significa sufrir un daño como la fuerza de las razones en contra de dañar que se derivan de los estados de daño. Argumentaré que existen distintos tipos de daño: absolutos y relativos, y que los primeros son cualitativamente más graves que los segundos. Argumentaré también que, si los daños sufridos pueden ser explicados enteramente en términos de daños absolutos, las consideraciones referidas a los daños relativos no deben entrar en juego. Tales consideraciones sólo deben ser tenidas en cuenta cuando los daños sufridos no puedan ser explicados enteramente en términos de daños absolutos. Si estas afirmaciones son correctas, contaremos con lineamientos que pueden servir de guía para, entre otras cosas, graduar la responsabilidad de los agentes en diferente clase de casos. (shrink)