Harm is one of the central concepts of ethics, so it would be good to offer an account of it. Many accounts appeal to a baseline: They say that you harm someone if you leave them worse off than in the baseline case. In this paper, I draw some lessons regarding what counts as an appropriate baseline and explore what these general lessons reveal about the nature of harm. In the process of so doing, I argue that a certain rarely discussed account of harm—the worse-than-nothing account of harm—does a particularly good job of identifying a baseline. This account says you harm someone if you leave them worse off than if you had done nothing to them.

中文翻译：

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危害、基线和比没有更糟糕的帐户

伤害是伦理学的核心概念之一，因此最好对它进行说明。许多账户都诉诸基线：他们说，如果你让某人的处境比基线情况更糟，你就会伤害他们。在本文中，我吸取了一些关于什么是适当的基线的教训，并探讨了这些一般性的教训揭示了伤害的本质。在这样做的过程中，我认为某个很少讨论的关于伤害的描述——关于伤害的最糟糕的描述——在确定基线方面做得特别好。这个帐户说，如果你让他们变得更糟，那么你会伤害他们，而不是你对他们没有做任何事情。