The Harm Test
People love to claim harm and many moral systems weigh harm strongly in their considerations rather than looking at what people have reasons to want to promote or inhibit in others.
Judging solely on harm creates moral systems many would balk at. I can show this through something I call The Harm Test - a scientific test for the notion of harm. This dovetails nicely with my view on the subjective/objective divide not being an impenetrable wall.
Harm must ultimately have a subjective component because "one man's poison is another's pleasure." It must also have objective, verifiable components for any moral system which addresses harm claims to function properly. The purpose of the harm test is solely to determine whether someone is objectively causing the claimed harm. It places no restrictions on what one does or does not subjectively like - what they consider harm - nor does it demand that something which passes the test is considered good, bad, or neutral. It simply traces the causal links between the victim and the alleged perpetrator. If no such link exists, then objectively no harm can be caused by the alleged perpetrator.
Judging solely on harm creates moral systems many would balk at. I can show this through something I call The Harm Test - a scientific test for the notion of harm. This dovetails nicely with my view on the subjective/objective divide not being an impenetrable wall.
Harm must ultimately have a subjective component because "one man's poison is another's pleasure." It must also have objective, verifiable components for any moral system which addresses harm claims to function properly. The purpose of the harm test is solely to determine whether someone is objectively causing the claimed harm. It places no restrictions on what one does or does not subjectively like - what they consider harm - nor does it demand that something which passes the test is considered good, bad, or neutral. It simply traces the causal links between the victim and the alleged perpetrator. If no such link exists, then objectively no harm can be caused by the alleged perpetrator.
What Harm Claims Must Objectively Mean
The subjective/objective wall is not as solid as people think it is. Even though harm statements are subjective, they are translatable to objective statements with truth values. When one makes the statement "X is harming me" it must mean "were it not for the effects from X, I would be better off" with better left as a personal valuation. So how do we test that?
First we must remove the purported offender from the equation. Why? Because that's the only way to guarantee the harm is removed from that individual. That's not to say that another won't come in an create a choice of dictators problem, but one is not allowed to play the what if game. It's not correct to demand that the harm stops from the offender. That's not the simple scientific approach. Scientists don't demand that fuel rods turn into delicious brownies they can eat - they remove them from the core and watch the radiation go down. People aren't unthinking fuel rods? True, but they are still lawfully-bound and if everyone could just not be jerks there wouldn't be a need for morality or moral tests in the first place.
Secondly, we must remove the purported offender at the point immediately before the harm in question. So far as we know the future doesn't affect the past so removing the purported offender from the equation after the harm occurred shows us nothing.
Thirdly, all relevant effects go with the purported offender. This is the toughest principle to sell, but it is the most charitable. <-- WHY?
First we must remove the purported offender from the equation. Why? Because that's the only way to guarantee the harm is removed from that individual. That's not to say that another won't come in an create a choice of dictators problem, but one is not allowed to play the what if game. It's not correct to demand that the harm stops from the offender. That's not the simple scientific approach. Scientists don't demand that fuel rods turn into delicious brownies they can eat - they remove them from the core and watch the radiation go down. People aren't unthinking fuel rods? True, but they are still lawfully-bound and if everyone could just not be jerks there wouldn't be a need for morality or moral tests in the first place.
Secondly, we must remove the purported offender at the point immediately before the harm in question. So far as we know the future doesn't affect the past so removing the purported offender from the equation after the harm occurred shows us nothing.
Thirdly, all relevant effects go with the purported offender. This is the toughest principle to sell, but it is the most charitable. <-- WHY?
The Requirements
The harm test questions the effects of removing the purported harmer and their contextual effects from the equation.
- If the situation gets no better with the removal of the alleged harmer then that person was not producing harm - just like if you remove a purportedly radioactive rod and the amount of radiation in a room doesn't go down. Why? Well, that's how effects work. If you remove a cause, the effect must change. If it doesn't then that thing wasn't the cause. Empirical.
- Perception of harm is still allowed to be subjective: looking at someone funnily could be considered by them to be harm.
- Harm must have measurable effects before a claim can be made. Those effects must be linkable (aka non-coincidental) - in the absence of proof, preferably though Bayesian probability - to a cause from the harmer. This eliminates guessing. That's not to say that secretly poisoning someone over the course of many years can't be considered harm - when it's discovered. The link is always there regardless of discovery, the consideration is not.
- The harm test cannot consider future "what if" scenarios, it's only focused on what actually is. Things which happen in the future aren't harm because they don't exist yet. Even very probable situations can't be entertained.
- The harm test is limited to the context of the claim, and cannot include extraneous elements. Only go back as far as you need to to eliminate noise. This is a good scientific control practice.
Some Examples
- Someone claims I'm harming them by not sharing cookies I baked. Remove me, the cookies go too since they were included in the harm claim and I'm necessary for their existence. Are they better off? No. Therefore I can't be harming them.
- I find water and there are people dying of thirst nearby, but I refuse to share the information with them. Remove me and the information goes too. They are no better off - not harm.
- Someone claims I'm harming them by mugging them. Remove me, the mugging goes away. Are they better off? Yes. Therefore I am harming them.
- Someone's father is mugging them. Remove the father, mugging goes away. Father can't claim that removal of him would lead to non-existence of victim since that's not related to the harm claim in question - it is out of the context.
- Someone, through a billing error is receiving a deluxe cable package instead of a standard one. They don't report it and it costs the cable company no actual (only potential) revenue. Not harm - there are no measurable effects on the cable company and potential revenues can't be counted. That doesn't mean that the person getting the free cable has desires that a good person would have - it just means that, objectively, a harm claim from the cable company is not actually true.
- Copyright infringement - not harm for the same reasons as #5
- Someone claims that a racist store is harming them which would normally fail for the same reasons as #1, but that the racist store is displacing potential non-racist stores. Speculation - irrelevant.
- Someone punches you but delays you enough that you avoid a fatal accident. Irrelevant - speculation at the time of occurrence - they did you no favors.
- Someone opens a new store which splits your customer base - you are being harmed.
- Blackmail is harm - remove the person and their threats disappear.
Why Desirism is Better than Harm-Predicated Moral Systems
While the harm test can call people out on false claims, unless one is using harm as the sole determiner of right and wrong, it can't, by itself, lead to normative statements. For instance, #1 and #2 seem douchey. #5 seems bad enough to make illegal or at least warrant reparations to the cable company if the person didn't make a minimum effort to inform the company of their error. #6 is considered bad enough to make illegal. As has #7 - at least certain expressions of business racism. Libertarians would balk at #9 and #10 being called bad.
Desirism focuses on reasons agents have for action - it just so happens that the only reasons for action that actually exist are desires. I want to make the point that the harm test is not flawed. Scientifically, it produces the correct results, it's just that the results don't lead to moral systems which most would claim work well. That is: harm-predicated moral systems are flawed (unless adherents accept the results of the examples listed above since I don't give them a right to be wrong).
I was initially drawn to a variant of this test while I was looking for some grounding which would show LVT was a moral tax. I was still into natural rights and hadn't heard of desirism or figured out what morality actually was yet.
For example, people might have reasons to discourage a desire for people to not correct the innocent errors of others because that can be indicative of or lead to a larger problem down the road. #5 might not be harm, but it can indicate that corrective efforts should be brought to bear before something "bad" happens. Hell, it can be even simpler than that - some people might just dislike moochers. It doesn't need to go further than that.
Desirism focuses on reasons agents have for action - it just so happens that the only reasons for action that actually exist are desires. I want to make the point that the harm test is not flawed. Scientifically, it produces the correct results, it's just that the results don't lead to moral systems which most would claim work well. That is: harm-predicated moral systems are flawed (unless adherents accept the results of the examples listed above since I don't give them a right to be wrong).
I was initially drawn to a variant of this test while I was looking for some grounding which would show LVT was a moral tax. I was still into natural rights and hadn't heard of desirism or figured out what morality actually was yet.
For example, people might have reasons to discourage a desire for people to not correct the innocent errors of others because that can be indicative of or lead to a larger problem down the road. #5 might not be harm, but it can indicate that corrective efforts should be brought to bear before something "bad" happens. Hell, it can be even simpler than that - some people might just dislike moochers. It doesn't need to go further than that.
Where the Harm Test is Still Useful
Ok, so why even bring up the harm test? Because I want people to own their values and falsely labeling things harm instead of being true about their actual values makes them unpredictable and hence untrustworthy (a great social destroyer). It also leads to people doing apparently dumb things and then complaining when they don't get what they purportedly wanted.
As an aside about the dumb things link above: if I were in charge of FEMA, I'd tell those people tough crap since they already got rid of people who were helping them and probably doing it cheaper than the government would. They wanted to instill a desire in those price gougers to not be selfish. However, they did so at a price of not getting ice and it should be a price they have to pay so they can be made to determine which value they hold more strongly. Bailing them out is subsidizing their choices by externalizing costs onto others. This doesn't jive with my position that values are best expressed to others by what one gives up to realize them.
As an aside about the dumb things link above: if I were in charge of FEMA, I'd tell those people tough crap since they already got rid of people who were helping them and probably doing it cheaper than the government would. They wanted to instill a desire in those price gougers to not be selfish. However, they did so at a price of not getting ice and it should be a price they have to pay so they can be made to determine which value they hold more strongly. Bailing them out is subsidizing their choices by externalizing costs onto others. This doesn't jive with my position that values are best expressed to others by what one gives up to realize them.
Where the Harm Test is Still Useful ... To Me
As a proponent of LVT and an author of The Actualization Ethic - I don't see ethics the same way as most. I see power relationships and opportunities. The end which The Actualization Ethic promotes is one of maximal actualization of individual desires. To achieve that, one needs to have maximal opportunity. True luck falls randomly and can't be corrected for without reducing overall opportunity. Since values are non-commensurable sans-agents, there's no way to figure out how to "share the wealth" anyways. The underlying ethical principle I abide by is that there are no overriding normative principles - if someone wants something enough then the most accurate way to figure out norms and values are through personal cost. If one doesn't care about truth, that's fine too, but natural selection certainly cares about liars.
These allow me to continue using The Harm Test in my moral calculus because it maps well with those principles. If someone isn't harming you, then they aren't costing you anything. Since they're not taking away opportunity, any corrective action would be a net reduction of opportunity and, per The Actualization Ethic, a moral wrong. If there are no meta-goals and everything can be reduced to costs and expressions of value, then anything goes and, hopefully, it will all work itself out.
What I can't do, of course, is pretend The Harm Test is anything other than a tool I'm using to justify an arbitrary goal. Even as an ad-hoc guiding principle, it needs some qualifiers. I judge on who is an introducer of net harm (or, per The Actualization Ethic, reducer of opportunity). This resolves issues with #7 and #8 - and thus leans strongly libertarian. That's ok, because freedom is an instrumental value I hold in high regard. It may not be for everyone, for instance those who hold the harm/care moral foundation over the liberty/oppression moral foundation; those people should probably reject using The Harm Test in their moral calculus (seemingly ironically in that those who care more about harm that liberty don't actually figure out what's harm first - but actually logically if one is judging potential future harm or whether or not such a person has desires one wants to see promoted).
These allow me to continue using The Harm Test in my moral calculus because it maps well with those principles. If someone isn't harming you, then they aren't costing you anything. Since they're not taking away opportunity, any corrective action would be a net reduction of opportunity and, per The Actualization Ethic, a moral wrong. If there are no meta-goals and everything can be reduced to costs and expressions of value, then anything goes and, hopefully, it will all work itself out.
What I can't do, of course, is pretend The Harm Test is anything other than a tool I'm using to justify an arbitrary goal. Even as an ad-hoc guiding principle, it needs some qualifiers. I judge on who is an introducer of net harm (or, per The Actualization Ethic, reducer of opportunity). This resolves issues with #7 and #8 - and thus leans strongly libertarian. That's ok, because freedom is an instrumental value I hold in high regard. It may not be for everyone, for instance those who hold the harm/care moral foundation over the liberty/oppression moral foundation; those people should probably reject using The Harm Test in their moral calculus (seemingly ironically in that those who care more about harm that liberty don't actually figure out what's harm first - but actually logically if one is judging potential future harm or whether or not such a person has desires one wants to see promoted).
