Abstract
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 (rather than merely allow him to) 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.
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Notes
Shiffrin (2012: 362).
More on the difference between harm and harming below.
This formulation of the counterfactual comparative account is Klocksiem’s (2012). Hanna (2015) formulates the view in a similar way. I follow them in using the possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals for the sake of clarity (Stalnaker 1968). Doing so facilitates explanation of the problems for the counterfactual comparative account of harm. I am not assuming realism about possible worlds.
Not all analyses of harm have this virtue. See, e.g. Roberts (1998: 32).
Thus the account of agential harm is quite different from Feinberg’s (1986) moralized account of agential harm. In part, this difference is due to Feinberg’s legal interest in using the concept of harm to determine when compensation is owed to a victim. Insofar as the counterfactual comparative account presented here diverges from Feinberg’s, I take this to be a virtue. It seems that one person can harm another without acting wrongly, and without owing the victim compensation, contrary to Feinberg’s account.
I thank Neil Feit for suggesting these examples to me. See Feit (2017) for other examples in which agents may be said to harm without acting.
Bradley (2012: 394). It is important to acknowledge that, taking all cases into account about which we have firm intuitions, CCA may do a better job fitting the data than alternative theories.
Hanser (2008: 427).
This revised version of Robin’s Clubs is inspired by Feit (2017) who offers examples in which it appears that the agent actively fails to benefit a person.
If we accept Neil Feit’s ‘plural’ version of the counterfactual comparative account of harm, we may be committed to the result that Robin suffers a harm even in cases where Batman fails to give Robin the golf clubs in the nearest possible world in which he does something other than swing the clubs. This will happen any time when swinging the clubs is a member of the smallest super-plurality of every plurality of events P such that (1) if none of the events in P had occurred, Robin would have been better off; and (2) there is no smaller sub-plurality of P such that if none of the events in it had occurred, Robin would have been better off. (Feit 2015: 17).
Klocksiem (2012: 294).
Klocksiem is here attempting to explain why our intuitions go awry, because he denies that there is any genuine metaphysical distinction between harming and failing to benefit.
Hanna (2015: 3). I have substituted the bracketed text for Hanna’s phrase “changing his mind” to maintain consistency with the Bradley’s original description of the example.
Like Nathan Hanna, Feit (2017) argues, more convincingly to my mind, that we should count failures to benefit as harms. I do not here have space to address Feit’s many interesting arguments.
Perry (2003: 1295).
Of course, Perry, as well the theorists I consider later, may be invoking the distinct but related concept of causation. It is not immediately clear, however, how invoking causation would help these theorists distinguish harms from mere failures to benefit. For example, Lewis’s (1973) counterfactual analysis of causation would clearly not help, and the authors I consider here do not provide detailed analyses of causation. An account of causation that requires the transfer of energy will be of no help in explaining how removing the net from the falling acrobat counts as a harm. Mackie’s ‘INUS condition’ for causation can explain the harmfulness of removing the net, because, on this account, removing the net is a cause of the death of the acrobat (i.e., removing the net is an insufficient but necessary component of a collection of factors that are themselves unnecessary but sufficient for the death) (Mackie 1965). But Mackie’s account, combined with the temporally comparative account, also implausibly entails that withdrawing a barrier is, in general, a harm, even when sustaining the barrier requires the use of resources belonging to the agent who withdraws the barrier. I am also unaware of an account of causation that would maintain a distinction between the case in which the Joker removes the clubs from Robin’s porch and the case in which Batman returns the clubs to his garage from his own stoop.
Hanser (2008: 440).
Ibid: 440.
Ibid: 442.
Hanser (2008: 421).
Shiffrin (2012: 386).
Bradley (2012: 400).
Shiffrin (2012: 368, fn. 24).
I will not discuss Elizabeth Harman’s account of harm, because it is sufficiently similar to Shiffrin’s account, and space is limited (Harman 2004).
Foot (1967).
Woollard (2015: 29–36). Woollard leaves the concept of relevance unanalyzed except to say that a fact’s being relevant to an upshot requires that the upshot in some way depends on the fact.
Ibid: 40–53. Woollard offers an extended analysis of the conditions under which a fact counts as a specificity positive fact—that is, a fact about what is (rather than what is not) the case. Drawing on Jonathan Bennett’s (1995) influential work, Woollard proposes that a fact about A’s behavior is specificity positive, just in case most of the ways A could have moved would have failed to make the corresponding proposition about A’s behavior true. I leave out this extended discussion for the sake of space.
Ibid: 57–59.
These cases are paraphrased from Woollard (2015: 62).
Ibid: 69–78. The situation becomes more complicated if, say, the Bob’s poisoning is due to actions on the part of the third-party owner of the car, the same car that now stands as a barrier against the threat posed to Victor. I set this complication aside (74).
In Drive Away 1–3, the car belongs to the person it does because that person owns it. But, Woollard claims, belonging is a weaker notion than ownership. An apartment can belong to the person renting it, but the renter does not own the apartment. I assume that Woollard’s verdicts about Drive Away 1–3 would remain the same if the car was stipulated to be a rental.
Notice that this account is not the same as the ‘causal comparative analysis’ discussed by Bradley (2004, 2012) and Conee (2006). According to the causal comparative account an event is harmful for someone if and only if its total causal consequence is worse for that person than its total prevention, where its total causal consequence is everything it causes to happen and its total prevention is what it causes not to happen. The causal comparative account solves some versions of the preemption problem, which my account does not, but the causal comparative account overcounts preventions. Suppose we wonder, what does an event cause not to happen? If the causal comparative account is to be distinguished from a straightforward counterfactual comparative account we cannot say that an event causes those events not to happen that otherwise would have happened. But then we seem to have to include events that would not have otherwise happened in the total prevention, and this results in too many preventions. By stealing the golf clubs, does the Joker cause Robin not to win the Masters? Robin would not have won anyway, but this can’t matter on the causal comparative account (Bradley 2012: 409–410). On HAM, we do not need to know what an event caused not to happen to determine whether it is a harm. Instead, we need to ask (i) whether the person is worse off than he otherwise would have been had the event not occurred, and (ii) whether the event makes a person occupy his actual well-being level.
Finally, HAM does not limit failures to benefit (harm) to those events that allow a person to occupy their level of well-being in the world in which the events occur. This is because one might think that an event can be a failure to benefit (harm) when it (a) is irrelevant to the upshot (where relevance at least requires dependence) but (b) is such that had it not occurred S’s well-being would have been higher. This sort of case might very well be impossible, because, whatever relevance amounts to, if a person’s level of well-being counterfactually depends on an event’s occurrence, this entails that the event is relevant to the person’s level of well-being. Still, I see no need to rule out this possibility in formulating HAM.
It does not solve the preemption problem for the counterfactual comparative account of harm. But see Feit (2015) for an ingenious reply to the preemption problem. Perhaps some combination of the account offered here and Feit’s account would both solve the preemption problem and successfully distinguish between harms and failures to benefit.
Here I have removed Woollard’s second sufficient condition regarding non-need based claims, because this condition is not important for my purposes.
Woollard’s original analysis violates ontological neutrality, but my friendly amendment does not.
This example is Bradley’s (1998: 118).
This problem cannot be avoided simply saying that backtracking counterfactual claims are all false. Backtracking counterfactuals are claims about how things would be earlier if later things were different. If backtracking counterfactual claims are all false, we can imagine that, rather than revealing information about past events, x-rays worked by reliably predicting future states of affairs on the basis of the best presently available evidence. This would be a remarkable machine indeed, but I am not convinced that it is metaphysically impossible.
Bradley (2009) uses this example in defending the claim that the dead can possess a level of well-being.
Bradley (2009) gives a similar argument. See also Feit (2016) who appeals to Kit Fine’s distinction between propositions being true in a possible world and propositions being true at a possible world. Feit argues that while it is false that I have a (zero) level of well-being in some possible world at a time at which I do not exist, it might be true that I have a (zero) level of well-being at some possible world at a time at which I do not exist, where my having a level of well-being of zero is grounded in facts about what I lack at that time at that world (e.g., any experiences of pleasure or pain). But see Carlson and Johansson (2018) for a reply to Feit.
There is a puzzle here about suicide. A momentarily depressed person who kills himself seems to harm himself, but my explanation of the harmfulness of killing seems unable to explain why. After all, momentarily depressed suicide victim removes material conditions for the provision of his well-being belonging only to him. Answering this worry requires providing an account of the conditions under which a person’s body counts as a resource belonging to him. I can only briefly, controversially, and perhaps incoherently suggest that an irrationally suicidal person’s body (and I assume that the momentarily depressed person is one such example) does not belong to them at the time of their illness. This is precisely why certain coercive interventions are not considered violations of bodily autonomy when they are designed to prevent a person with severe mental illness from harming themselves.
Shiffrin (2012: 375).
Shiffrin (2012: 361).
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Acknowledgements
I owe a significant debt to Neil Feit, Molly Gardner, Jens Johansson, Stephen Kershnar, Justin Klocksiem, and Michael Tooley for helpful written comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to Matthew Hanser for a particularly illuminating conversation about these issues. I am also grateful to participants at the 2016 Bled Ethics Conference for their valuable feedback. Finally, this paper was significantly improved by a challenging set of comments from an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies.
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Purves, D. Harming as making worse off. Philos Stud 176, 2629–2656 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1144-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1144-1