Abstract
What determines the degree to which some event harms a subject? According to the counterfactual comparative account, an event is harmful for a subject to the extent that she would have been overall better off if it had not occurred. Unlike the causation based account, this view nicely accounts for deprivational harms, including the harm of death, and for cases in which events constitute a harm rather than causing it. However, I argue, it ultimately fails, since not every intrinsically bad state that is counterfactually dependent on an event contributes to its degree of harm. So while the causation based account is too restrictive, the counterfactual comparative view is not restrictive enough. In light of this, I suggest an alternative, explanation based account of overall harm, according to which the degree to which some event is harmful for a subject is determined by the degree to which (crudely) the states explained by it are overall more intrinsically bad than intrinsically good for her.
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Notes
Not all adherents of causation-based accounts and of the counterfactual comparative account discussed below address degrees of harm. Given that my interest is an account that captures the degree of harm, I focus on formulations that do.
See Shiffrin (2012) for this sort of causation based account.
Some counterfactual comparative accounts involve modifications of COMPARE in light of objections discussed in Sect. 5. (See: Purves 2019; Klocksiem 2012; Feit 2015; Bradley 2004, pp. 18–21; 2009, 2.2, Hanna 2015). Moreover, some versions account for overall benefit on top of accounting for overall harm. For the sake of concise presentation of the main problem, it will be easiest to focus on COMPARE for now. For similar formulations, see Bradley (2009, p. 50), Broome (1999; 2004); Feldman (1991), p. 150).
How is a particular event of death individuated? In order for COMPARE to get off the ground, events must not be taken to be extremely modally fragile (with the stringent identity conditions). Otherwise: the nearest world in which some event of death does not take place will always be a world in which a very similar death takes place an extremely short period after it. This delivers a counterintuitive result COMPARE was supposed to avoid, viz. that individual deaths are essentially unharmful, since what is deprived by them is negligible. Bradley (2009, p. 56) allows for contexts in which ‘particular death’ is understood in a way that renders the designated event modally fragile, but emphasizes that such contexts are “odd” (ibid.), and that there are normal contexts in which ‘particular death’ is not taken as modally fragile.
There are perhaps conversational contexts in which we rightly associate the pain preceding death with the harms of a particular death. I will discuss such contexts below (in Sect. 5).
What I mean by saying that an assertion about the case in question is accommodated by a normal context is roughly that it meets the following (sufficient) condition: when asserted to an arbitrary individual that knows the nonlinguistic facts about the case but who cannot be presupposed to share any wide background knowledge or purposes, no communicative effort (e.g. no further explanations on behalf of the speaker or interpretive effort on behalf of the audience) is adequately assumed to be required for understanding what is said. Some things we might say, such as ‘Joseph’s death is highly beneficial for him’ may be accommodated while requiring interpretational effort yielding a context shift.
For generating the argument, it suffices that there is a context in which Joseph’s death is extremely harmful (roughly to the degree designated by COMPARE and OPTION ONE minus the degree to which the pain involved in dying was harmful) and that COMPARE fails to establish its degree of harm.
I will not consider theories that give ultimate priority to factual similarity (including in facts obtaining after the antecedent event) in determining nearness relations. Not only because they are independently problematic, but because when coupled with such a theory, COMPARE obviously fails as an account of harm. Put crudely, the problem is that given the similarity of subsequent events, any event turns out hardly consequential for the subject on this view.
Theories of counterfactuals vary with respect to how they balance factual similarity and nomological similarity. Some theories give ultimate priority to nomological similarity, keeping the laws of nature fixed across possible worlds (under consideration). (This view has recently been defended by Dorr (2016). In the context of accounts of harm, it is held by McMahan (1988, p. 48). Other theories recognize counterfactual miracles: allowing nearby worlds to contain local, preferably small, divergences from the laws of nature so as to prevent E from occurring shortly before it does. This is Lewis’s (1973) view.
Explicitly in the context of backtracking: McMahan (2002, 112–117) supposes that an intuitive comparison is merely a matter of correct tradeoff between similarity criteria. The analysis of cases like JOSEPH undermines this view.
For this reason, emphasizing that assigning degrees of harm is context dependent along the lines of Bradley (2009), or Bradley (2004, pp. 49–50) will not help. If there is any context in which Joseph’s death should appropriately be considered bad for him, COMPARE would fail to establish the degree to which it’s bad for him in that context. Intuitively, for instance there is a perfectly normal context in which it is bad for Joseph to die at a young age. But the nearest possible world in which Joseph dies much older is either a world in which he fails to suffer from the poison, or a world in which he is tortured with the rest of his town.
Given the dialectic, candidates based on an approach that renders COMPARE unappealing altogether are set aside. For this reason I do not consider the option on which Joseph dies of the poison a few milliseconds later than he actually does (see footnote 4).
The case of backtracking is essentially different from cases of overdetermination (and preemption) in this respect. Standard approaches to overdetermination are inapplicable to cases of backtracking. For instance, according to Feit (2015): E harms S to degree n iff E is the smallest super-plurality of every plurality of events P such that (1) if none of the events in P had occurred, S would have been better off by n,and (2) there is no smaller sub-plurality of P such that if none of the events in it had occurred, S would have been better off by n. In the case of overdetermination it is natural to take a plurality of events to jointly constitute a compound harmful event, E, since no individual event is such that if it wasn’t for its occurrence, S would have been better off. However, in cases like JOSEPH the harm of some component, viz. Joseph’s death, is intuitively different to that of the compound event. Formulated in terms of a counterfactual comparative account Feit’s criterion fails exactly where COMPARE fails.
Aside for the problems discussed below, COMPARE + seems to rely on the controversial presupposition that persons that no longer exist have degrees of well-being (particularly when this principle is applied to evaluate events of death). I will set the discussion of this potential problem aside.
For a similar objection to COMPARE see Purves (2019, penultimate paragraph of Sect. 3). Horwich (1989, pp. 169–170) and Maudlin (1994, pp. 128–129) discuss cases in which counterfactual dependence departs from causation, including cases of backtracking, and effects of a common cause. (Thanks to Arnon Keren).
Although nothing said so far makes this presupposition committal. EXPLAIN can be modified to an account that takes events as vehicles of intrinsic harm (in the spirit of Hanser (2008), for instance), or an account that takes facts to play this role.
See Beebee (2004, pp. 307–8) for instance.
Beebee (2004) defends the view that absences (like the failure of an event to take place) do not cause, while respecting the role absences play in our explanatory practices.
Adherents of the network model of causal explanation may opt for PLURAL-EXPLAIN discussed below. This fits nicely with the way it handles redundant causation. See Paul and Hall (2013, ch.3) for an elaborate discussion.
A plurality of events E1, E2 is nothing over and above those two events, and a super-plurality of events is nothing over and above the events which some pluralities, its sub-pluralities, consist of. (So a super-plurality of the plurality that includes E1 and E2, and the plurality that includes E2 and E3, will include precisely E1, E2 and E3). This technical notion is used in order to cover cases where (for example) every two events (among E1, E2 and E3) would suffice to bring about a harm of degree n, but where all three events take place.
Feit’s original criterion is discussed in footnote 13.
Carlson et. al. (Manuscript) challenge accounts that address problems of redundant causation by covering harm of pluralities of events. PLURAL-EXPLAIN, like Feit’s (2015) view, will have to face the challenges they raise.
Bradley (2004, p. 11) calls such contexts ‘non-standard’.
This includes cases in which context picks out a different explanans by changing the way in which events are individuated. (see McMahan (1988, p. 45) for instance).
In response to this challenge Purves upholds Woollard’s (2008) distinction between making and allowing to argue that only what we make (not what we allow) constitutes the degree of harm we bring about (See Purves (2019, p. 2644) for a concise presentation of the distinction). See Johansson and Risberg’s (2020) criticism.
Schaffer (2005) takes causation to be contrastive in this twofold way.
Likewise for the case discussed by Norcross (Norcross 2005, pp. 165–6) where intuitively there is a sense in which Bobby Knight harms the person he chokes, even if had he not choked her, he would have torn off both her arms. Contrastivists can say that Knight’s choking the person rather than restraining himself explains why that person suffered pain. Nonetheless, Knight’s choking the person rather than tearing off her arms explains why she is altogether well off.
Given space limitations, other accounts were not addressed.
Thanks to audiences at the University of Haifa and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for helpful discussions. Special thanks to Erik Carlson, David Enoch, Eric Olson, Andrew Peet, and anonymous referees of Philosophical Studies for their priceless comments.
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Pitcovski, E. Explaining Harm. Philos Stud 180, 509–527 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01909-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01909-z