The Ethics of Horror Inducement

This chapter analyzes the concepts of harm and benefit. There is a tendency in the literature on the metaphysics of harm to assume symmetric accounts of harm and benefit. But there are deep asymmetries between harm and benefit, recommending asymmetric metaphysical accounts. For harm and benefit, in turn, this chapter considers whether counterfactual comparative, temporal comparative, and non-comparative conditions are necessary or sufficient. For harm, the judgement reached is that a non-comparative condition—whereby harm is a matter of being in a bad state even if not in a worse state—is necessary and sufficient. It is further discussed why “non-comparative” is a misleading term for this account, and a more precise terminology of trans-comparative account is recommended. For benefit, the judgement reached is that temporal comparative and counterfactual comparative conditions are individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary; being benefited is a matter of being made temporally or counterfactually better-off. It is shown that this asymmetric metaphysical accounts allow for an important ethical distinction between harm-averting and non-harm-averting benefits. Next this distinction and an analogy between the ethics of human horror-inducement and the ethics of divine creation and sustenance is used to develop an ethical framework for theodicy. A taxonomy is constructed by sketching four cases of human action where horrors are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit (i.e. a benefit that does not avert a still greater harm) or for harm avoidance.