Harm and Its Moral Significance

Legal Theory 18 (3):357-398 (2012)
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Abstract

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

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2012-10-17

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Seana Shiffrin
University of California, Los Angeles

Citations of this work

Procreation is Immoral on Environmental Grounds.Chad Vance - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (1):101-124.
Harming as making worse off.Duncan Purves - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2629-2656.
A Simple Analysis of Harm.Jens Johansson & Olle Risberg - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9:509-536.
Harm: Omission, Preemption, Freedom.Nathan Hanna - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):251-73.
The metaphysics of harm.Matthew Hanser - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2):421-450.

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References found in this work

On Liberty and Other Essays.John Stuart Mill (ed.) - 1991 - Oxford University Press.
Preference and urgency.T. M. Scanlon - 1975 - Journal of Philosophy 72 (19):655-669.
The Fragmentation of Value.Thomas Nagel - 1979 - In Mortal questions. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Can we harm and benefit in creating?Elizabeth Harman - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):89–113.

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