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)

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)

Perhaps death’s badness is an illusion. Epicureans think so and argue that agents cannot be harmed by death when they’re alive nor when they’re dead. I argue that each version of Epicureanism faces a fatal dilemma: it is either committed to a demonstrably false view about the relationship between self-regarding reasons and well-being or it is involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. I first provide principled reason to think that any viable view about the badness of death must (...) allow that agents have self-regarding reason to avoid death if doing so would increase their total well-being. I then show that Epicurean views which do not preserve this link are subject to reductio arguments and so should be rejected. After that, I show that the Epicurean views which accommodate this desideratum are involved in a merely verbal dispute with deprivationism. (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)

The Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm says that an event is overall harmful for someone if and only if it makes her worse off than she otherwise would have been. I defend this account from two common objections.

If Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death are successful, then they also successfully undermine a common justification for physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the termination of hopeless pregnancies that I call the ‘Mercy Intuition', according to which, by ending the life of a suffering loved one for whom there is little to no chance of recovery, one is relieving that person of her suffering, and thus providing a great benefit to her. For, if death is not a harm to the (...) person who dies, then it cannot be a benefit to her either, even in cases of intense and prolonged suffering. Along these lines, in this paper, I defend the claim that death cannot provide a benefit to those who are suffering. I begin by highlighting the Epicurean foundations of the argument, focusing on three main Epicurean arguments for the harmlessness of death and their no-benefit analogues. I then move on to explore several important limitations of the argument, which make available a number of strategies for avoiding its conclusion. Along the way, I respond to each of these avoidance strategies. I conclude that even granting several of its limitations, the argument still poses a serious challenge to the Mercy Intuition. (shrink)

According to the Timing Argument, death is not bad for the individual who dies, because there is no time at which it could be bad for her. Defenders of the badness of death have objected to this influential argument, typically by arguing that there are times at which death is bad for its victim. In this paper, I argue that a number of these writers have been concerned with quite different formulations of the Timing Argument. Further, and more importantly, I (...) show that their objections to the Timing Argument fail as attempts to refute the argument in its most challenging form. (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)

Can existence benefit or harm a person? I argue that it cannot. In order for existence to harm a person it has to be the case that existence is worse for the person than never existing. This claim could only be true if it is understood as a claim about the actual, extrinsic value of existence for a person. However, understanding harm in terms of actual extrinsic value comes at the cost of depriving benefits and harms of their normative relevance. (...) I show that a person who is guided by promoting actual extrinsic value can face situations where an outcome is extrinsically better for her but where the same outcome would be extrinsically worse for her were it to obtain. A person who is guided by promoting extrinsic value will in such situations not be able to deliberate about what she should do, prudentially or morally. I conclude that extrinsic value is therefore not something we should be guided by when deliberating about what we should do, and that if harm and benefit is understood in terms of extrinsic value, then we should not be guided by these notions either. (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)

Pictures of sides of beef, hanging from overhead rails in refrigerated warehouses and meat-processing plants, often leave a feeling of unease. These pictures provoke the notion that human beings have no right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the sole purpose of providing food. However, the ethical analysis conducted in this study shows that meat production, if animal welfare and deaths per calorie created are considered, is less of a pressing problem compared to the production of (...) milk. While meat can be provided with minimal suffering to animals, the consumption of milk is always associated with considerable suffering during the dairy cow’s life-span and the lives of their offspring. Moreover, more bovine deaths per unit of calorific value created are associated with milk production compared to meat production. The vegan movement, which is currently growing, wishes to minimise farm animal suffering as much as possible. However, if a vegan diet is not possible, consumers should make an informed decision about the products they consume. Replacement of the calories obtained from meat with those from milk and dairy products is not rational if animal welfare is considered. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, John Martin Fischer defends the view that death harms its victim after she dies. More specifically, he develops a “truthmaking” account in order to solve what he calls the Problem of Predication for this view. In this reply, we argue that Fischer’s proposed solution to this problem is unsuccessful.

In the Global Burden of Disease study, disease burden is measured as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). The paramount assumption of the DALY is that it makes sense to aggregate years lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs). However, this is not smooth sailing. Whereas morbidity (YLD) is something thathappens toan individual, loss of life itself (YLL) occurs when that individual’s life has ended. YLLs quantify something that involves no experience and does not take place among living individuals. (...) This casts doubt on whether the YLL is an individual burden at all. If not, then YLDs and YLLs are incommensurable. There are at least three responses to this problem, only one of which is tenable: a counterfactual account of harm. Taking this strategy necessitates a re-examination of how we count YLLs, particularly at the beginning of life. (shrink)