Harm, Baselines, and the Worse than Nothing Account

Abstract

Abstract Harm is one of the central concepts of ethics, so it would be good to offer an account of it. Many accounts appeal to a baseline: They say that you harm someone if you leave them worse off than in the baseline case. In this paper, I draw some lessons regarding what counts as an appropriate baseline and explore what these general lessons reveal about the nature of harm. In the process of so doing, I argue that a certain rarely discussed account of harm—the worse-than-nothing account of harm—does a particularly good job of identifying a baseline. This account says you harm someone if you leave them worse off than if you had done nothing to them.