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 at identifying a baseline. This account says you harm someone if you leave them worse off than if you had done nothing to them.