Doing and Allowing Harm to Future Generations

Abstract

In this thesis, I aim to clarify what moral accounts of harm can tell us about the strength of the reason against real-world long-term harm doing. To this end, I develop a novel account of harm, and defend the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing (DDA) as a principle that partly explains the strength of harm-based moral reasons. The DDA says that the reason against doing harm is stronger than the reason against merely allowing harm. I discuss three challenges for the DDA which, if successful, undermine the ability of the DDA to guide action in real-world cases. First, the DDA has difficulties accounting for cases of letting oneself do harm. Second, it is unclear how the DDA applies to cases under risk, and specifically, cases in which agents offset risks of harm. Third, the DDA has been argued to have deeply implausible implications in cases of long-term, indirect and unpredictable harm doing. I defend the DDA against these challenges and, in doing so, clarify how the DDA applies to real-world long-term decision making.
However, such clarification is only useful when it can be combined with a plausible and comprehensive account of harm. I develop a novel account of harm, which combines a hybrid view on the nature of harm with a two-dimensional view on harm-based moral reasons. The hybrid view on harm says that both ill-being and a loss of well-being constitute a harmed condition. The two-dimensional view on harming says that behaviour can qualify as harming either because it makes a difference to, or because it causally contributes to, a harmed condition. I argue that my account shares advantages with views discussed in the literature, while avoiding their major problems. I specifically defend the temporal comparative account of harm (as one component of the hybrid view) against seemingly fatal counterexamples and show that it is in fact more plausible than the much more prominent counterfactual version of the account. The upshot is that accounts of harm can inform decision-making in long-term cases. This supports the view that the notion of harm deserves its central role in moral theory, and the view that the DDA is well suited to provide real-world action guidance.

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