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Harm: Omission, Preemption, Freedom
Author(s) -
Hanthan
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12244
Subject(s) - harm , harm principle , metaphysics , philosophy , political philosophy , libertarianism , consequentialism , politics , sociology , law , epistemology , political science
CCA is an attractive account of harm. It has many virtues and many advantages over its competitors. But I won’t explore those features here. Ben Bradley gives a nice summary of them, though he ultimately rejects CCA (2012: 396–7, 401). In this paper, I’ll reply to two objections to CCA that haven’t been adequately addressed in the literature. Some critics think that certain omission and preemption cases raise obviously fatal problems for it. I’ll argue that they’re wrong. First, a caveat: CCA is about overall harm, which is different from pro tanto harm. I’ll explain this distinction later and use it to show that preemption cases don’t raise obviously fatal problems for CCA. Until then, my discussion will be confined to overall harm and I’ll leave the “overall” implicit.