What it means for an event to harm: a historical baseline variant of the causal account of harming

Abstract According to the causal account of harming, an event harms a person if and only if it causes the person to be worse off. This view has emerged as a popular alternative to the more traditional view, according to which an event harms a person if and only if the person would have been better off had the event not occurred. In this paper, my primary aim is to motivate and defend a certain variant of the causal account of harming. Moreover, I also situate this variant within recent attempts to provide a unified account of harm.