Making ascriptions of harmfulness

Criminologists and zemiologists regularly ascribe harmfulness to a range of social phenomena, from beliefs and motifs to social structures and subjectivities. But what does it mean – and what do we need – to assert that such phenomena are harmful to someone or something? In this article, I argue that an account of harmfulness is equally important to an account of harm, and that arriving at the latter does not necessarily provide us with guidance on what is harmful to someone or something. Moreover, I address several recently expressed worries about relativism about harm and argue that through properly accounting for both harm and harmfulness we can – and should – accept a certain type of relativism about harm, given that discourses, practices, social structures, and other social objects are not harmful simpliciter but harmful to someone, usually under certain conditions. I argue that social harm scholars and criminologists concerned with particularly freewheeling forms of subjectivism or relativism about social harm can allay some of these concerns by distinguishing between what is conditionally and unconditionally harmful to someone.