This thought—that harm is not comparative—has some prominence in the literature. For example, Shiffrin says:
Accounts that identify harms with certain absolute, noncomparative conditions (e.g., a list of evils like broken limbs, disabilities, episodes of pain, significant losses, death) and benefits with an independently identified set of goods (e.g., material enhancement, sensual pleasure, goal-fulfilment, nonessential knowledge,
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competitive advantages) would not generate these puzzles [associated with com-parative accounts]. (Shiffrin 1999, 123)
Elizabeth Harman says ‘an action harms someone if it causes the person to be in a bad state. Bad states are understood as states that are in themselves bad, not bad because they are worse than the state the person would otherwise have been in’ (Harman 2009, 139).
Let us formulate this view.
Noncomparative Account of Harm and Benefit. Y (pro tanto) harms X iff (and be-cause) Y makes it the case that X is in a noncomparatively bad state. Y (pro tanto) benefits X iff (and because) Y makes it the case that X is in a noncom-paratively good state.124
The Noncomparative Account is a view of pro tanto and not all-things-considered harm.125 This is because, on the all-things-considered reading of the view, one would harm someone only if one made it the case that they were in a noncomparatively bad state all-things-considered. But this is implausible. For example, luckily, to make my life noncomparatively bad all-things-considered, one would have to significantly lessen my well-being. But surely I can be harmed all-things-considered by events that fall much shorter than such drastic changes to my life.
Given that the Noncomparative Account is an account of pro tanto harm, ‘it is compatible with the comparative account since they are about different things’ (Bradley 2012, 399).
But this disunified account of pro tanto and all-things-considered harm is odd. For exam-ple, think again of Hitmen (Nonlethal Variant), in which Hitman1 non-fatally shoots Victim and, had she not shot, Hitman2 would have nonfatally shot Victim in the same way.126
124 (Shiffrin 1999; 2012; Harman 2004; 2009). Woollard thinks there is a noncomparative and a compara-tive sense of harming, and that, ‘[o]ther things being equal, our reasons against harming are much stronger if we would harm a person in the overall-comparison sense’ (Woollard 2012, 686). Again, we could offer a more basic definition of the Noncomparative Account.
125 Harman says that she is not denying that we sometimes use harm in an all-things-considered way, indi-cating that she sees her condition as merely a sufficient condition on pro tanto harm (Harman 2004, 109;
Thomson 2011, 439).
126 I use a non-lethal variant of Hitmen to avoid discussion of whether the Noncomparative Account can recognise death as harmful (Bradley 2012, 400–401). This depends on what makes a state noncomparatively bad.
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Here, given the Noncomparative Account there is (i) pro tanto harm and (ii) no pro tanto benefit, but given the Counterfactual Account there is (iii) no all-things-considered harm and (iv) no all-things-considered benefit. This is very odd. Underlying the oddness is some-thing like the following plausible thought: ‘[all-some-things-considered] harm and pro tanto harm are closely related. In fact, they seem interdefinable. Whether something is all-things-con-sidered harmful is a function of the ways in which it is pro tanto harmful or beneficial’
(Bradley 2012, 393). This picture runs afoul of this very plausible thought. So, I am not sure where this leaves the defender of the Noncomparative Account when it comes to all-things-considered harm. (Perhaps they will deny all-all-things-considered harm.) This does mean one will have to endorse the Pro Tanto Thesis from above.127
So, what reason do we have to endorse the Noncomparative Account? It can recognise preempted harm as, at the least, pro tanto harm. In Hitmen (Nonlethal Variant), Hitman1
makes it that Victim is in a noncomparatively bad state; given this, she (pro tanto) harms Victim. The Noncomparative Account seems also to get the cases right when it comes to the Problem of Omission. In Golf Clubs, Batman does not make it that Robin is in a noncomparatively bad state, so Batman does not harm him. Since receiving gifts seems like the sort of thing that would not be out of place on Shiffrin’s list of benefits, Batman fails to benefit Robin. Further, since the defender of the Noncomparative Account can distinguish between harm and benefit, they are in a good place to answer the Problem of the Harm/Failure to Benefit Asymmetry.128
127 Defenders of the Noncomparative Account will have to make similar meta-normative claims when want-ing the Noncomparative Account to do whatever work it is introduced to do. For example, were one to introduce the Noncomparative Account as a solution to the Non-Identity Problem (see the following note), one would also have to claim that we have reason not to harm pro tanto where our harming pro tanto cannot be justified by bestowing pro tanto benefits.
128 The Noncomparative Account was primarily offered as a solution to the Non-Identity Problem. Suppose Mother is considering conceiving but is suffering from condition x. She is warned by her doctor that if she has a child in her current state, her baby will be born with a serious disability; if Mother waits two months before conceiving, her child will be born without the disability. Mother decides, on a whim, to have the child anyway, whom she calls Child. Child is subsequently born with a serious disability, but one that does not make her life not worth living (i.e., Child would not prefer nonexistence to existence with such a hand-icap). Some people think Mother harms Child by failing to wait two months before conceiving. However, were Mother to have waited two months to conceive, a different egg would have been fertilised with a different sperm and so a different person would have been born. Accordingly, the Counterfactual Account implies Child is not harmed by Mother’s action since she is not worse off than she would have been had
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As Shiffrin appreciates, ‘[i]f one could, in addition, provide an account that explained what unified such items, why they were together classified as harm, one might make fur-ther inroads to support […] the asymmetries’ (Shiffrin 1999, 123; 2012, 376). Her own account is that ‘harm involves a distinctive sort of frustration or impediment of the will of the ability to exert and effect one’s will’ (Shiffrin 2012, 383; 1999, 123). However, this account is not very convincing. This is because Shiffrin is confusing two different questions (Tadros 2016a, 179). First, we can ask whether the sort of thing that is affected when we are harmed is wellbeing, or whether it is those things one has a stake in, or perhaps the relationship between one’s will and the real world, and so on.129 Second, we can ask, spotting an answer to this first question, how ought we determine whether one has been harmed. Ought we compare how their [wellbeing/things they have a stake in/relation-ship between world and will] fares with how it would have fared otherwise (Counterfac-tual Account), with how it was prior to acting (Temporal Account), or do we not compare it whatsoever (Noncomparative Account)? Shiffrin’s speculation that ‘harm involves con-ditions that generate a significant chasm or conflict between one’s will and one’s experi-ence’ concerns the first question, and so is not very helpful when trying to defend the Noncomparative Account, which is an answer to the second question. For example, we could think one is harmed when the chasm between one’s will and one’s experience is made greater than it otherwise would have been, thereby endorsing a version of the Coun-terfactual Account. Perhaps Shiffrin’s thought is, “Look, these states are noncompara-tively bad because they create a chasm between one’s will and one’s experiences.” But it is not at all clear why that is true only of noncomparatively bad states.130
Mother waited two months to conceive (Parfit 1984, 351–80). However, Mother harms Child according to the Noncomparative Account as she makes it that Child is in a non-comparatively bad state. I am inclined to think Mother does not harm Child, nor do I think this would explain why her action is wrong (Boonin 2014). For further discussion, see (Bradley 2012, 398; Tadros 2016a, 189–90).
129 The first of these is the view we have been assuming, the second is Feinberg’s view of interests, the setting back of which constitute harms (Feinberg 1984, 33–34), and the third is Shiffrin’s.
130 For explicit objections to this focus on autonomy as determining what sort of thing is affected when we are harmed, see (Bradley 2012, 400; Tadros 2016a, 179–80). Given my discussion of autonomy elsewhere in this thesis, one should be able to guess what I would say about such an account (e.g., chapter 6, section 3).
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Harman says that her ‘list of harms is unified by comparison with a healthy state (though I haven’t claimed that all harms meet this condition)’ (Harman 2004, 111). I cannot say I like the look of this picture either. But I am not going to take that up. Rather, in the following subsection, we see we have good reason to be sceptical of the Noncomparative Account independently from not having a robust picture of what states are harmful and which are beneficial.