Can a Risk Be a Harm, and When Is Imposing Risk Wrong? A Consequentialist, Preventive, Contractualist Theory of Morality

Rowe has recently argued that pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm, while Stefánsson has replied that – given an appropriate understanding of objective risk – it can. In this article, I refer to their contributions as paradigmatic of the current discussion in the risk/harm debate, I try to critique them, and I then move on to consider other relevant thinkers such as Scanlon, Finkelstein, Frick and Oberdiek. The aim of this article is to offer a consequentialist theory of contractualism and a resulting definition of objective risk to outline why pure risk of harm cannot itself be a harm, and to explore two ideas that might be of interest to anyone concerned with metaethics: (i) whether to correctly understand ‘objective risk’ we must redefine the concept in contractualist terms, clearly separating it from ‘objective probability’; and (ii) whether the extent of the wrongness of an action depends entirely on the unjustifiable risks it raises and is thus fully separate from whether it causes harm.