a defense of the counterfactual comparative strongaccountstrong of harm.pdf

A Defense of The Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm Justin Klocksiem University of Alabama AmericanPhilosophicalQuarterly vol. 49 no. 4 (October 2012) 1 Introduction. Harm has often been thought to have particular moral signicance. It seems that one of our primary moral obligations is to refrain from harming others—that some action would cause or constitute a harm is a strong moral reason against performing it. According to J. S. Mill, for example, harm is of central political importance: the state is justied in interfering withouractivitiesonlyifwewouldharmourfellowcreatures. AndaccordingtoRoss,the duty of non-malecence is a crucial part of the correct normative ethical theory; he claims Mill (1978, pp. 11 – 2). Ross (1933, pp. 21 – 2). 1 that the duty to refrain from harming others, is more basic, stringent, and binding than the corresponding positive duty of benecence. But what is harm ?A natural and intuitive way of thinking of harm is that someone is harmed when things go worse for her than they otherwise would have. On this view, an event, e, constitutes a harm for S if and only if S is better off in the nearest possible world in which e does not occur than she is in the relevant e-world. This account explains why, for example, we generally regard gunshot wounds as harmful; why we think it would be harmful to prevent someone from acquiring a benet such as medical attention for a gunshot wound; and how one could harm a person by seeing to it that she receive twenty million dollars. In each case, we can imagine that the relevant person would be better off hadtherelevanteventnotoccurred—hadthepersonnotsustainedthegunshotwound; had the person received medical attention; had the person received the forty million dollars she was about to receive. But thi