The main purpose of the project has been to achieve a better understanding of the concept of harm and its ethical relevance. While there exists a lively debate on what it is for an event to harm someone, this debate has not involved any detailed discussion of the ethical relevance of harm. Likewise, there are many debates in moral philosophy where the ethical relevance of harm is presupposed, but in these debates there is little discussion of what harm consists in. By examining various theories of the nature of harm, with respect to their implications for the ethical relevance (or lack thereof) of harm, we have sought to deepen and bring together these different discussions.

Jens Johansson has been principal investigator. Other project members have been Per Algander (postdoc), Katharina Berndt Rasmussen (postdoc), Erik Carlson, and Björn Petersson. The project has been an integrated part of the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University, where many different kinds of activitities have taken place within or closely connected with the project. We organized a two-day conference in Uppsala in 2016, where the speakers included all project members as well as four specially invited participants in the international philosophical debate on harm. Papers from the conference will be published in a special thematic issue of the journal, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. In 2018 we organized a three-day conference, with three parallel sessions, which mainly focused on death and its possible harmfulness. Per Algander has organized an informal reading group, which has attracted colleagues both inside and outside of the project. Many of our own papers, as well as other works relevant to the project, have been presented at the research seminar in practical philosophy at the department. Several of the publications in the project are co-authored, in some cases with non-project members. Open access has been secured by agreements with the relevant publishers, and by publication in DiVA and on our academic webpages (to be done shortly).

The first of the project's three most important results concerns the standard account of harm, the counterfactual account. On this view, for an event (e.g. an action) to harm a person is for it to make the person worse off than he or she would have been if it had not occurred -- that is, the person's "well-being level" would have otherwise been higher. Several project members argue in a number of articles that this view, as well as various variants of it that have been suggested in the literature, is incompatible with some very plausible claims about the normative significance of harm. For example, the counterfactual account is incompatible with the claim that if one action benefits a person and one alternative to the action harms the person, then there is a reason to choose the former action rather than the latter.

The second of the project's three most important results concerns the so-called non-identity problem in population ethics. The problem, as well as its name, is due to the fact that many actions affect which individuals will exist in the future. For instance, while a more environment-friendly policy might result in greater total well-being for future generations than a less environment-friendly policy, the two future scenarios might well contain different individuals. If so, the less environment-friendly policy does not seem to affect any future individual for the worse. The less environment-friendly policy nevertheless seems morally impermissible. A great many philosophers, who otherwise defend opposite views in this debate, have proposed to deal with this problem by appeal to the normative importance of harm. We argue in various ways, however, that this perspective on the issue at hand is deeply problematic. If the non-identity problem is to have a harm-based solution, we need to posit metaphysically extravagant objects whose existence most philosophers are unwilling to countenance.

The third of the project's most important results concerns harm and discrimination. Katharina Berndt Rasmussen accounts for the moral impermissibility of discrimination by claiming that the discriminatee is harmed whether or not the discrimination affects his or her well-being level. This approach requires, and thereby gives indirect support for, a theory of harm that, unlike traditional theories, are not exclusively based on well-being.

Among the new research topics to which the project has given rise, one that deserves to be highlighted is the question of what it takes to be a well-being subject: to occupy a well-being level. For instance, does something automatically occupy a neutral well-being level, rather than no well-being level at all, if it fails to occupy a positive or negative well-being level? Can things like collectives of people, or plants, or inorganic beings, have a positive or negative well-being level? This topic is important for several issues in applied ethics (e.g. bioethics and environmental ethics) as well as in more theoretical fields of moral phillosophy (e.g. structural problems in axiology).

The international dimensions of the project are, to begin with, exemplified by the fact that the vast majority of our publications are in international journals and anthologies. We have presented our work at conferences and departments in, for instance, the US, the UK, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Czech Republic. The 2016 and 2018 conferences in Uppsala had many international participants. The abovementioned special thematic issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, based on one of the conferences, will have an Australian guest editor and several American contributors.