Browsing by Author "Komu, Philbert Joseph"

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    Being harmed and harming: government responsibility for inadequate healthcare
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Komu, Philbert Joseph; Roodt, Vasti; De Villiers-Botha, Tanya; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Despite the importance of the concept of harm in formal and applied ethics, the concept itself has received comparatively little attention. This dissertation aims to develop a concept of harm that can carry the weight of the moral arguments that rely on it. It is generally considered wrong to harm others, and as a good thing to act in a way that avoids, prevents, or lessens harm to them. Yet we are often hard-pressed to say what it is for a thing to be harmed, or to cause harm. Traditionally, there are non-comparative accounts of harm whose generalised view is that harms are at the same time intrinsic bads, and comparative accounts which commonly view harms as events that leave us worse off than we historically were before their occurrence or than we would have counterfactually been had the events not occurred. On the one hand, both of these accounts are inconsistent with some of our moral intuitions about harm; on the other, they do accept – but fail to show why – it is impossible to think of harms that are not bad for their victims in some respect. In this dissertation, I defend the concept of harm as prudential disvalue, which coherently holds that harms are bad for their victims from their own perspective. In order to avoid being radically subjective and including trivial things under the definition of harm, I adopt the “appealing-life view”, arguing that harms are things that detract from the appealworthiness of being in someone’s position. I then apply this revised concept of harm to a real-world example. I show why the lack of access to adequate healthcare services in Tanzania is a harm, in what respects the Tanzanian government is responsible for this harm, and why this harm is not justified, which renders the government morally blameworthy. In the domain of formal moral theory, the dissertation contributes to the scholarly literature on the problem of harm. In the field of applied ethics, the dissertation helps us to understand not only the nature of hardships endured by people within an inadequately-resourced and -managed healthcare system, but also the responsibility for the harm suffered as a result of these institutional failures.