What is harm? Or, when is it correct to say that a person, or a thing has been harmed? I defend a familiar account against a recently advanced rival.<\/p>\n
I claim \u2013a) all and only things having a good of their own \u2013 people, animals, plants \u2013 can be harmed; b) they enter a harmed condition<\/em> when their level of well-being becomes less good than it would have been, were some harming event<\/em> not to have occurred; c) harm involves ones undergoing some intrinsic change \u2013 relational change isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n Three important consequences of this: death can harm us; there are no posthumous harms; undiscovered betrayal doesn\u2019t harm us.<\/p>\n What can justify these claims? I contend that all there is to harm is what, ordinarily but after reflection, we want to say about it. Hence my title, and the familiarity of much of what I say. An alternative account, that we need a philosophical investigation into the nature of harm, is one that I consider and reject.<\/p>\n This talk will be of interest to all those needing to know what harm is, and when it occurs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Belshaw, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy The Language of Harm 5 June 2013 What is harm? Or, when is it correct to say that a person, or a thing has been harmed? I defend a familiar account against a recently advanced rival. I claim \u2013a) all and only things having a good of their own […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,34],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-events-publications","category-research-seminars","tag-seminar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/62"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/philosophy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}