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In Defense of the State-Based Account of Harming

Lee, Joseph
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Abstract

According to the dominant account of harming, to harm an agent is to cause her to occupy a harmed state. Matthew Hanser rejects this “state-based” account, arguing that each version of it faces counterexamples. Instead, Hanser argues, to harm an agent is to cause her to suffer harm, where suffering harm is undergoing an event: in particular, it is losing or being prevented from receiving a basic good. In this thesis, I argue that this “event-based” account is, at best, a version of the state-based account. The identity of any event as the suffering of a harm, I argue, derives from the fact that it causes the agent to occupy a harmed state. I then defend the “counterfactual comparative” version of the state-based account against three prominent objections. The intended upshot of my arguments is that the state-based account of harming is superior to its event-based counterpart.

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Date
2017-08-08
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Research Projects
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Keywords
Action theory, Counterfactuals, Preemption, Omissions, Metaphysics of harm, Matthew Hanser
Citation
Lee, Joseph. "In Defense of the State-Based Account of Harming." 2017. Thesis, Georgia State University. https://doi.org/10.57709/10241000
Embargo Lift Date
2017-06-01
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