Distinguished Teaching Professor Neil Feit recently returned from Uppsala, Sweden, where he gave a talk at the conference and workshop “Harm: The Concept and Its Relevance.”
Dr. Feit, professor of Philosophy, joined three other invited speakers from American universities and five speakers from Swedish universities to discuss the nature and the moral importance of the concept of harm. The event was hosted by Uppsala University and funded by the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Feit recently published two articles on the concept of harm. The first, “Plural Harm,” appears in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2016), and the second, “Comparative Harm, Creation and Death,” in Utilitas (2016).
His conference talk was based on a third paper, “Harming by Failing to Benefit.” In it, Feit argues that typical cases intuitively judged to be instances of mere failure to benefit – deciding not to donate to charity, for example – are in fact cases where one person harms another or others. He also argues, however, that moral reasons to refrain from inflicting harm per se are very weak at best.
