Abstract
According to the counterfactual comparative account (CCA), an event harms a person if and only if it makes things worse for her. Cases of overdetermination and preemption pose a serious challenge to CCA since, in these cases, although it is evident that people are harmed, there are no individual events that harm them. However, while there are no individual events that make people worse off in cases of overdetermination and preemption, there are pluralities of events that do so. In light of this feature of these cases, several philosophers have suggested that it is these pluralities that do the harming. In this article, I will argue that although the most prominent accounts of plural harm – e.g., Neil Feit’s account – fare better than one might initially think, they fail to deal adequately with a number of intriguing cases of preemption first introduced by Alastair Norcross. I will also introduce a new view on plural harm and argue that this view, apart from dealing with the cases of overdetermination and preemption that the other accounts of plural harm handle, also deals adequately with Norcross’s cases.
Highlights
The most widely discussed account of harm is arguably the counterfactual comparative account of harm: CCA: An event E harms S if and only if S would have been better off if E had not occurred.1Apart from being simple, CCA has several other attractive features
One of the most attractive features of CCA is perhaps that it explains the harm of death
A new principle of plural harm according to Norcross, Y acts wrongly because ‘‘[we] don’t, in general, excuse behavior that appears to be wrong, if we discover that the agent wouldn’t have had the opportunity to perform the wrong act, were it not for seemingly unrelated behavior of someone else’’ (2005, 156)
Summary
The most widely discussed account of harm is arguably the counterfactual comparative account of harm: CCA: An event E harms S if and only if S would have been better off if E had not occurred.. Several philosophers have developed views based on the attractive idea that the plurality consisting of X’s act and Y’s act harms me, that is to say, that X’s act and Y’s act together harm me.. Feit’s proposal handles several of the difficulties confronting Parfit’s view, it fails (or so I shall argue) to deal adequately with a couple of intriguing cases first introduced by Alastair Norcross, where one of these cases involves a counterfactually dependent event and the other involves an unavailable event (2005). I shall develop a new view that apart from handling cases like Shooters, handles Norcross’s cases too. During the course of the discussion, I reply to some potential counterexamples to my view (Sect. 7)
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