ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a growing jurisprudential and philosophical literature on the concept of harm, in particular, what it means to suffer harm. This paper defends the most unpopular account of what it means to suffer harm, the temporal comparative account of harm (TCA). According to TCA, what it means to suffer harm just is for a person to come to be in a state in which they are worse off than they were before. My defence of the TCA proceeds as follows. Firstly, I explain why it is that one might find the TCA appealing to begin with. Then, I respond to three sets of concerns that have been levied against the TCA: (1) concerns about the sufficiency of historical worsenings for harm; (2) concerns about the necessity of historical worsenings for harm; and (3) concerns about the downstream consequences of adopting the TCA in general. If my arguments are successful, we ought to take the TCA much more seriously as a plausible account of what it means to suffer harm.

摘要

近年来，关于伤害概念的法学和哲学文献越来越多，尤其是关于遭受伤害的含义。本文捍卫了最不受欢迎的关于遭受伤害意味着什么的解释，即伤害的时间比较解释 (TCA)。根据 TCA 的说法，遭受伤害的意思是让一个人处于比以前更糟的状态. 我对 TCA 的辩护如下。首先，我解释了为什么人们可能会从一开始就发现 TCA 很有吸引力。然后，我回应对 TCA 提出的三组担忧：（1）对历史恶化是否足以造成伤害的担忧；(2) 担心历史恶化对伤害的必要性；(3) 一般而言，对采用 TCA 的下游后果的担忧。如果我的论点是成功的，我们应该更加认真地对待 TCA，作为对遭受伤害意味着什么的合理解释。