The Relevance of Harm as the Criterion for the Punishment of Impossible Attempts (original) (raw)
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Ethics 110(4) (2000): 749–79, 2000
The article takes as its starting point the assumption that (a) competing accounts of moral rules should be judged by the distribution of benefits and burdens which would arise from everyone accepting these rules, and that (b) these benefits and burdens are understood in a way which has a substantial resource or freedom-based component. This starting point is compatible with contractualism and various forms of rule consequentialism, and will yield a morality in which people have significant freedoms. The main claim of the article is that as a consequence of these freedoms, and because of phenomena connected with cost internalization, this morality will also impose strong constraints on harming and weak constraints on allowing harm. Thus the starting point ends up vindicating commonsense morality.
To Harm or Not to Harm?, 2014
This paper present a contemporary approach to the harm principle.
Understanding Harm and its Moral Significance
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2019
The paper explores how harm must be understood if intuitively attractive deontological principles concerning the infliction and prevention of harm are to be vindicated. It focuses especially upon how harm must be understood if it is to be plausible that preventing people from undergoing harm takes priority over improving the conditions of badly-off people who have not suffered harm. Keywords Harm. Deontological principles. Intrinsic/extrinsic value For the moral philosopher, there are two main questions about harm: what is it? and how, if at all, does it matter morally? Answering the first question requires giving an account of harm; answering the second requires giving an account of harm's moral significance (or lack thereof). There are in turn two main approaches we can take in addressing these questions: we can tackle them serially, moving to the second only after we have answered the first; or we can tackle them in tandem. The guiding thought behind the former approach is that we cannot profitably address the question how (or why, or whether) harm is morally significant until we better understand what harm is. We should thus begin by seeking a theoretically unified and extensionally adequate account of harm-one whose implications line up, as much as possible, with our confident, pre-theoretical, non-moral intuitions about what are and are not instances of harm. Once we have such an account in hand, we can ask whether harm, so understood, is morally significant, and if so, how. Despite this approach's obvious appeal, I think we would do better to adopt the second approach. Part of the reason for this is that I doubt we possess a single, unitary notion of harm. Rather, we possess several different notions, distinguished in part by the different normative roles that they play, or are at least thought to play. There is a maximally broad notion of harm, according to which anything that is in some way bad for someone harms him. (Likewise, there
Bontly on Harm and the Non-Identity Problem
Utilitas, 2019
The ‘non-identity problem’ raises a well-known challenge to the person-affecting view, according to which an action can be wrong only if it affects someone for the worse. In a recent article, however, Thomas D. Bontly proposes a novel way to solve the non-identity problem in person-affecting terms. Bontly's argument is based on a contrastive causal account of harm. In this response, we argue that Bontly's argument fails even assuming that the contrastive causal account is correct.
Harm and Its Moral Significance
Standard, familiar models portray harms and benefits as symmetrical. Usually, harm is portrayed as involving a worsening of one's situation, and benefits as involving an improvement. Yet morally, the aversion, prevention, and relief of harms seem, at least presumptively, to matter more than the provision, protection, and maintenance of comparable and often greater benefits. Standard models of harms and benefits have difficulty acknowledging this priority, much less explaining it. They also fail to identify harm accurately and reliably. In this paper, I develop these problems, argue that we should reconsider our commitment to the standard models, and then merely gesture at the direction in which we might locate a superior approach, one that better accounts for the moral significance of harm and its relation to autonomy rights.
Reply to Klocksiem on the Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2020
In a recent article in this journal, I claimed that the widely held counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCA) violates two very plausible principles about harm and prudential reasons. Justin Klocksiem argues, in a reply, that CCA is in fact compatible with these principles. In this rejoinder, I shall try to show that Klocksiem’s defense of CCA fails.
Harm: A Substitute for Crime or Central to It
This chapter argues that harm is central to crime, as reflected in early legal doctrine, ongoing scholarly debate, and contemporary criminal policy, but not a substitute for crime. It describes a systematic, evidence-based approach to operationalising ‘harm’ in criminal policy and criminology, namely, a harm assessment framework; shows how harm assessment can serve criminal policy and criminology; and proposes using ‘harmfulness’ as a criterion for establishing criminality and to inform decisions about law enforcement priorities, sentencing, victim assistance programs and restorative justice, all with the potential to advance social justice. On that basis, the chapter supports the zemiological perspective, without abandoning criminology.