What is it to Harm Someone? The Sneaky Cheater and Other Considerations

Imagine you are in a monogamous romantic relationship and your partner cheats on you. Imagine, further, that you will never find out unless they tell you. If they never confess to their actions, have you been harmed?

Many people respond, ‘yes, of course I have been harmed!’ to this question. This answer implies that we can be harmed without knowing that we have been harmed. But others think that harm necessarily involves an experience on the part of the person being harmed. So, in the scenario above, it seems that unless you actually experience the harm of your partner cheating on you, you would not be harmed by it. Perhaps, in this case, you do experience the harm, but you experience it without knowing it: your partner might change the way they interact with you, and while you might attribute this change to another cause, unbeknownst to you, the actual cause for their change in behaviour is their unfaithful actions. But if you could have a guarantee that you would not experience any harm — let us suppose your partner does not change their behaviour at all — have you really been harmed at all?

This question has importance in our lives past the case of the sneaky cheater. For instance, if we cannot be harmed unless we (knowingly or unknowingly) experience the harm, then, if an afterlife does not exist, the dead cannot be harmed. This calls into question the moral standing of the command to respect the wishes of the dead, often done through honouring the contents of people’s wills.

If we can be harmed even when we do not experience the harm, consider the case where someone has a morally problematic belief, but it is one they never act on. Are gay, lesbian, and bisexual people being harmed by those who believe that romantically loving someone who is not of the ‘opposite’ gender is wrong but never act (knowingly or unknowingly) on this belief? In this case and others like it, not only is the potential harm not experienced as harmful, it has no corresponding action at all. If harm does not require us to experience it, does it require an action at all? Can beliefs, on their own, be harmful?

Discussion Questions

Further Reading

• “What Could We Owe to the Dead?” by Jared Smith (2022)
• “Can Beliefs be Morally Wrong?” by Lewis Ross (2021)

Bibliography

Ross, Lewis. 2021. “Can Beliefs be Morally Wrong?” Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, May 4, 2021. https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/blog/2021/05/04/can-beliefs-be-morally-wrong/.

Smith, Jared. 2022. “What Could We Owe to the Dead?” Baylor College of Medicine, November 18, 2022. https://blogs.bcm.edu/2022/11/18/what-could-we-owe-to-the-dead/.

Whicher, Sophia. 2024. “What is it to Harm Someone? The Sneaky Cheater and Other.” In Ethics Bowl Canada 2023-2024 National Case Set, edited by Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development Committee. n.p.: Ethics Bowl Canada. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IYW9BoZuJckjpj74ku24pLJgmTCj9h10/view

Attribution

Unless otherwise noted, “What is it to Harm Someone? The Sneaky Cheater and Other” by Sophia Whicher (2024) [and the Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development Committee], via Ethics Bowl Canada, is used and adapted under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

The Ethics Bowl Canada Case Development committee gives permission to third parties to use the Case Sets it has developed between September 2021 and March 2024 under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The Committee also asks that users notify Ethics Bowl Canada of their use of the case sets, especially if they are adapting or remixing it. This can be done by sending an email to contact@ethicsbowl.ca.