Welfare involves all those features of life that make life worth living. Utilitarians believe that welfare is reducible to happiness or pleasure. For the utilitarian, all worthwhile things, such as food, education, sex, security, the arts, recreation, wealth, income, and longevity, are measured by how much pain they avoid or how much pleasure they produce. But theorists debate whether and how such a notion of welfare can be measured. Economists focus on revealed preferences, and seek to promote welfare by securing what people prefer. But others insist that interests count more than preferences. The American philosopher Joel Feinberg defines an interest as something which a person has a stake in because that person stands to gain or lose depending on what happens to it. Thus, welfare may be gained by promoting and protecting people's interests. Interests are somewhat more objective than preferences, which are defined in an entirely personal or subjective way. For example, one cannot have a preference for something one does not know about, but one may have an interest in it. If I inherited a million dollars yesterday but was not informed about it, I still have an (unknown) interest in that money. Although we may not prefer the things that promote good health, we can have an interest in them. We may claim that interests appear more objective because some interests exist independently of our knowledge, and others may know better than we what our interests are.  Top

    Interests

    One approach to welfare is defined in terms of satisfying human interests. This approach, however, is subject to criticism because people have interests in odd, sometimes elaborate, sometimes harmful, things, such as extreme wealth or illegal drugs. A theorist is inclined to rank interests; some are more important than others, some more valuable (regardless of how 'valuable' is defined). Without health, for example, little else matters. Health is a fundamental interest, while owning 30 shares of a Fortune 500 stock is less fundamental. Morally speaking, we may have greater obligations in relation to basic needs (food, clothing, medical care, basic education) than to less basic goods. So if all of us have an obligation to be charitable, then that obligation might focus less on contributions to a college than those to a food-for-the-poor program. And if we have a general political obligation to promote welfare, then in ranking goods our efforts ought to be directed first of all to meeting basic needs.  Top

    Utilitarianism and interests

    Depending on the order of priority among interests, a different form of utilitarianism may be developed. We might add to Jeremy Bentham's list of standards used to judge pleasures (duration, intensity, propinquity, certainty, fruitfulness, and purity) that a more basic interest is to be given priority over a less basic interest, regardless of how subjectively pleased this makes a person. Subjective pleasure may be considered a faulty indication of genuine, long-run pleasure. We can justify this by claiming that actions now affect people in the future. Because we cannot predict the future with accuracy, basic needs are arguably a better indication of future happiness than less basic goods.
    Welfare is typically extended to include the absence of harm, which, together with the injunction against committing harm, is often singled out for special consideration. Some theorists believe that a prohibition against harm is the most important thing in moral life. Many are tempted to say that as long as I don't harm anyone else, I should be free, morally speaking, to do what I want. Compared to nebulous concepts like freedom and justice, nonharm sounds like a term that should be easy to define. Although the difficulties are not as great, defining 'nonharm' is not as straightforward as at first appears. (Before going on, you should try to formulate what you mean by not harming someone else.)  Top

Harm

    Joel Feinberg, an American philosopher, completed, in 1988, a massive, four-volume study of "harm," The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Anyone interested in the concept of harm is well-advised to consult this careful and thorough study. Feinberg's work is about the limitations we should place on governmental use of the coercion (including incarceration) involved in the application of criminal law. He argues that criminal law should only be employed to protect against harm. In this way, Feinberg is a liberal, meaning that for him individual freedom is a basic value which should only be curtailed, in this case by imprisonment, as a last resort. Use of the coercive power of criminal law requires a strict moral defense: Feinberg believes that imprisonment is only justified if it can be shown to prevent harm, and for this reason he offers his conception of harm. We are not going to explore his examination of the criminal law; instead, we will focus on how he develops his notion of harm.  Top

    Joel Feinberg’s account of harm

   In Feinberg's account, 'harm' means a setback to an interest. This typically includes physical and emotional harm, as well as setbacks to interests like financial gain. If we extend Feinberg's analysis beyond the criminal law and introduce a nonharm principle, claiming that we all have a basic moral responsibility not to harm, then difficulties become apparent. On a daily basis, we all are harmed in ways that are not morally offensive. When an instructor gives a grade, students may be harmed, even seriously harmed. Yet this is not usually considered to be covered by a nonharm principle, "Do no harm". Feinberg deals with such accepted cases of harm by adding that nonharm really refers to "wrongful" harms. A wrongful harm is a harm that violates a person's rights. But this leads to problems about what rights a person has, a moral issue that must be solved before we know what kinds of harm count as wrongful. When we question whether harms are wrongful, the whole idea of using nonharm as a basic value begins to look suspect because some harms, those that do not violate rights, are not considered to be wrong. There must be some values included in rights that turn harms into being wrongful or nonwrongful; these values serve to evaluate harm. In their evaluative role, these other values seem to take primacy over harm as a basic value; if nonharm were the basic value, then all harms would be wrongful.
    Problems continue. Feinberg begins to extend the notion of harm. The simple claim -- that as long as I don't harm anyone else, I can do what I want -- looks more complex as he extends the notion. Harm starts out involving an individual doing something against another; the first extension involves the failure to do something. In some cases, a failure to act is, in Feinberg's view, the moral equivalence of actually doing harm.  Top

    Preventing harm

    Feinberg's extension of his conception of harm comes by way of an analysis of a bad Samaritan. We know that a Good Samaritan helps another in need. A bad Samaritan refuses to help. To make matters worse, this person may refuse to help even when helping involves little or no personal effort or cost. Imagine a person sitting by the side of a swimming pool watching a small child drown when the child could easily have been pulled from the pool and saved. Imagine that the child is near the side of the pool, so without even getting wet this bad Samaritan could have saved a life. By refusing to help the child, does the bad Samaritan cause harm? Whether or not the person is the cause, Feinberg believes that he or she does contribute to harm. Not helping the child is is morally equivalent to causing harm. So he calls for bad-Samaritan laws that make it a crime to fail to help when giving help involves little personal cost. Thus, Feinberg believes that a harmed person is harmed by those who could have prevented that harm at little personal cost. This sense of harm, preventing harm when at little personal cost, extends the nonharm principle; we cannot simply do what we want unless it harms someone else, but now we must also seek to prevent harm when that comes at little personal cost.   Top

    Harm and social action

    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.
    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.  Top

    What counts as harm?

   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. 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. Then those with more must 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, even when someone else has more. 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.  Top