Abstract
Benefit and harm are canonical principles in bioethics. Providers must do no harm and act in the best interests of their patients. A fundamental principle of research ethics is that research is unethical if its harms outweigh its benefits. Applying these principles requires understanding the concepts of harm and benefit, whether and how they can be distinguished, whether they are asymmetrical (such as that preventing harm is more important than providing benefit), and how they are to be identified.
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References
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Further Readings
Beauchamp, T. (Winter 2013 Edition). The principle of beneficence in applied ethics. In: E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/principle-beneficence/
Feinberg, J. (1977). Harm and self-interest. In P. M. S. Hacker & J. Hax (Eds.), Law, morality, and society: Essays in honor of H.L.A. Hart (pp. 287–308). Oxford: Clarendon.
Klocksiem, J. (2012). A defense of the counterfactual comparative account of harming. American Philosophical Quarterly, 49(4), 285–300.
Shiffrin, S. (2012). Harm and its moral significance. Legal Theory, 18(3), 357–398.
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Francis, L. (2016). Benefit and Harm. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_39
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