Harm and Prudence

This chapter looks what what I call the basic presumption, which I take to be a desideratum on any account of overall harm. Roughly, the basic presumption is the idea that it’s always imprudent to overall harm yourself (or let yourself be overall harmed) and always prudent to overall benefit yourself (or let yourself be overall benefited). If something is neither an overall harm nor a benefit, it would make no prudential difference whether it occurred. In this chapter, I show that a version of the counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCA) that is actualist in nature can accommodate the basic presumption, while none of its rivals can. The fact that CCA can accommodate the basic presumption and neither causal accounts of harm nor the negative impact on well-being account of harm can is, I argue, good evidence in favor of CCA. I end the chapter with a discussion of NIWA, where I raise additional additional objections against it.