What’s “Harm” got to do With It? An Analysis of “Harm” in the Medical Context

Although the concept “harm” has been at the center of the profession and philosophy of medicine for millennia, its analysis has largely remained within the province of moral and political philosophy. In this research project I examine the nature of harm within the specific area of medicine. Focusing on the medical sub-discipline of psychiatry, this research project examines four interrelated areas where the nature of harm is in dispute and where clarifying its nature will be instructive to medicine more broadly. Specifically, I will examine the most clinically utilized account of the concept “disorder,” the harmful dysfunction analysis, in order to provide a coherent account of the “harm” criterion; the neurodiversity movement’s argument that treatments harm neurodiverse individuals; the nature of sexual paraphilias, in order to disambiguate moral from medically relevant harms; and the metaethics of physician assisted suicide in order to determine the way harms are measured against one another and the against the harm of death. Each analysis provides an important contribution to a general analysis of harm in medicine.