The real problem with counterfactual accounts of harm

Abstract Counterfactual accounts of harm are the dominant accounts of harm. According to such accounts, an event harms a person only if the person would have been better off had the event (or a state of affairs caused by the event) not occurred. Although there are many objections to counterfactual accounts of harm in the literature, which say that such accounts get certain special cases wrong, their force is limited. In this paper, I present a more decisive objection against counterfactual accounts of harm, which says that they get most standard cases of harm wrong. In most such cases, it is neither true that the victim of harm would have been better off, nor true that he would not have been better off, had the harm (or any state of affairs caused by the harm) not occurred. This, I argue, is the real problem with counterfactual accounts of harm.