#4 – Must harms be experienced to be harmful? Fischer on unexperienced harm.

Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

In this episode, I evaluate Fischer's argument that being betrayed secretly by one's friends and family would be harmful even if one were to never directly or indirectly experience anything from it. I consider two lives, one with a secret betrayal and another without it, though otherwise qualitatively identical. Fischer doesn't specify exactly why secret betrayals are harmful other than that they would set our interests back, so our intuitions that they are may be based in a confusion between direct and indirect effects of it. I agree with Fischer that a counterfactual intervener would falsify a weak experience requirement, that if one is harmed by a secret betrayal, then a shield would eliminate any possibility of experiencing it or effects of it, though, I argue, such an intervener would need to be infallible. I end with a brief description of my own view of the harm of death: destructivism. Incapacitations such as comas induced by strokes are similar to death in that they both are harmful in virtue of our loss of welfare at the time of their occurrence.