Harm
If we agree that preventing harm, when at little personal cost, is a basic moral responsibility, we begin see the need to extend the nonharm principle even further. Acting together we may have a responsibility to prevent harm because through collective action personal cost can be minimized. If you or I are given the responsibility, individually, to prevent harm, we may be able to do very little. But through social cooperation, with pooled resources, we have prevented harm through programs ranging from medical vaccination to fire and police protection.
We do this through organized intervention: police and fire departments, the maintenance of a social infrastructure, health care, education, and the like. For example, through taxation, we are able to supply the money necessary to fund many activities designed to avoid or prevent harm, including, for example, disability and unemployment insurance. Feinberg comments: "Part of the reason why I don't have a duty to maximize the harm-preventing I can achieve on my own is that society collectively has preempted that duty and reassigned it in fair shares to private individuals. Collectively there is hardly any limit to how far we are prepared to go to prevent serious harms to individuals." Thus, Feinberg believes that by using cooperative techniques, we, together, can prevent harm at comparatively little personal cost to us individually. Of course we might feel oppressed by taxation, but that is another story. In a genuinely harm preventing society, tax might seem more like social insurance.”
Feinberg's willingness to use the government to help prevent harm adds a utilitarian note to his sense of nonharm, yet he insists on a fair division of social burdens. A utilitarian is willing, theoretically speaking, to place great burdens on you and me. We may be required to sacrifice all we have and become saints. This may be commendable, but it seems to go beyond the ordinary demands of moral requirements. The utilitarian shrinks the moral range by making nearly all recommended actions obligatory. Feinberg, on the other hand, does not require individually heroic action; by organizing socially we can spread the burdens of harm-avoidance. Social problems addressed by governments involve such harms as poverty, lack of education and health care, unemployment or underemployment, and pollution. Under Feinberg's analysis, people may be morally guilty of doing harm when do not support the use of governmental power to avoid harm in these crucial areas.
In Feinberg's conception of harm, the nonharm principle moves well beyond prohibiting direct personal harm. Now it dictates a social attempt to prevent harm. Thus we move into the realm of political morality. Today, the ability to do good and to do evil largely rests with governments. Governmental action is part of the moral domain. When it is considered as a way to guide us, collectively, in fulfilling moral responsibilities to prevent harm, an evaluation of governmental action becomes a crucial part of morality. Governments may act wisely or foolishly in attempting to prevent harm. Once governments are entrusted with much of the collective response to harm-prevention, it should come under frequent and careful moral evaluation.
The move to large-scale social action to prevent harm leads to difficulties; the problem of defining and locating harm becomes more difficult and perhaps more crucial. We now ask questions about who, or what group, is suffering harm and to what degree. Philosophers understand the difficulties in determining when harm is done because judgments about harm are made from different perspectives. For example, suppose Sammie has been ridiculed all her life. Now she has grown accustomed to that ridicule. Tammy comes along and subjects Sammie to serious verbal harassment, but Sammie seems unaware of Tammy's attempt to offend. Is Tammy's action harmful? We don't want to excuse Tammy because Sammie is accustomed to ridicule, so we might not judge the action by the actual harm done, but by a different standard: what would reasonably harm a typical person. We might reasonably expect that the typical person would be harmed by Tammy's abusive remarks, and thus label the remarks as harmful. But in the actual case, Sammie is not harmed by Tammy's abuse.
The question is, should we judge the harm done in relation to a general standard, based on a typical or normal situation, or judge it in terms of the actual condition of Tammy and Sammie? This is a question of the proper baseline for determining harm. (Philosopher’s should take baseline issues more seriously in general.) The conception of harm used in any moral theory must give serious attention to the selection of a proper baseline because, depending on the baseline used, different moral judgments will be made.
If we take money away from a rich person, we harm that person. But is a less wealthy person harmed by not having as much money as the rich person? The baseline is the point from which we make such judgments. If the current situation is the baseline, then we assume that people rightly have what they have. The poor may be harmed because they lack health care, or jobs, or education, but not because they do not have enough money to buy the things they want. On the other hand, suppose we take equality as the proper baseline. (Equality, unfortunately, is a vague term in moral theory, though one might think that it might be the clearest of terms.)
Given this, those with more might need to justify having more. Because we believe that the rich are harmed if they lose money, we may also believe that the poor are harmed by not having money. People may grow accustomed to some things in the environment of poverty; for example, they might not be harmed in the same way others would be harmed by offensive or ugly conditions. But this may be like the case of Sammie. We may want to judge harm by how a typical person would react, and not by the way someone reacts who has become accustomed to a bad environment. Poor housing, ugly and polluted neighborhoods, poor health, crime, and lack of opportunity are best measured, one may argue, from a baseline of equality. That is, using the notion of equality as a baseline, we can determine the extent of harm done by the environment of poverty better than by simply looking at the way people are currently harmed.
Another alternative is that the proper baseline is the point at which all basic needs are satisfied; thus anyone whose basic needs are not met is harmed, and people above the baseline are not socially harmed Using basic needs as a baseline will support different judgments than using either the status quo or equality.
A baseline is needed because people's interests, a key ingredient in the conception of harm, are partly formed by social processes. People might routinely accept harm because they are socially conditioned to believe that the harm is proper, or perhaps because they do not notice the harm. But when a baseline is established, we may better understand the harm done by social processes. For example, as long as we do not have a baseline for comparison, we have difficulty deciding which kinds of social roles are exploitative. Does the fact that males have a significantly lower life expectancy than women indicate social harm? Suppose the baseline is equality. Under this assumption, we would ask the question about men living shorter lives this way: if the social roles of men and women were equal, would men still show the same difference in life expectancy? Suppose that the difference in life expectancy would be less under equality. Then we argue that men are socially harmed. But if equality is not the baseline, we may argue that men have chosen activities that lead to shorter life expectancy -- for example, smoking. In this case, men have hurt themselves and are not socially harmed. This example should show that the baseline we accept makes a difference in how we view harm, especially harm socially caused. The baseline helps pose the question. But answering such questions is difficult, no matter what the baseline.
Harm started out as a simple notion, but we found significant room for disagreement about the role it should play in a basic moral principle. Some would prefer a narrow notion, defined in relation to direct individual action that wrongfully affects the interests of another. Others want a broad conception of harm, relying on the baseline of equality, and so they include in their moral evaluations social influences and socially organized actions that foster harm-prevention.