Toward a Feminist View of Harm

Oppression, Harm, and Feminist Philosophy

In many ways, our understanding of oppression is closely tied to the concept of harm. This connection is especially clear in feminist philosophy—not only do feminist philosophers regularly analyze oppression’s physical, material, psychological, and social harms, but they often argue that harm is a constitutive feature of oppression.

For instance, in Analyzing Oppression, Ann Cudd includes harm in her set of conditions that must be satisfied for something to count as oppression, defining oppression itself as an “institutionally structured harm” (26). Marilyn Frye similarly argues that, to get clear about what oppression is (and what it is not), we must determine which harms constitute elements of oppression.

As a result, the concept of harm appears regularly in feminist work on a range of topics associated with oppression. To name just a few examples, Christina Friedlaender presents a taxonomy of harm in their analysis of microaggressions, Miranda Fricker discusses the harms of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, Iris Marion Young engages with the harms of structural injustice, and several theorists discuss the harms resulting from objectification.

Though harm clearly plays a central role in feminist theorizing on oppression, there’s been little-to-no discussion of what exactly is meant by “harm” in these contexts. This wouldn’t be a problem if harm were a simple, uncontroversial concept where intuitive notions alone would suffice. But harm is not such a simple concept, and there are often significant disagreements about what counts as harm. As a result, relying on intuitive notions of harm can make analyses highly susceptible to biases, inconsistencies, and other inaccuracies. Feminists, in particular, should reject such a reliance, as it may lead to understandings of harm that center privileged social locations (given that the harms experienced only by those in marginalized social positions may not be as easily recognized or understood by others).

In addition, feminist work often aims to push back against certain social norms or practices to demonstrate how widely accepted behaviors—behaviors that some might not intuitively recognize as harmful—in fact produce serious harms. In discussing gender-based oppression, for example, Catherine MacKinnon explains how “if [we] look neutrally on the reality of gender so produced, the harm that has been done will not be perceptible as harm. It becomes just the way things are” (59). Based on this, I argue it is important to clarify our understanding of harm itself if we are to effectively employ the concept in feminist theorizing about oppression.

Philosophy of Harm

The philosophical work on harm appears to be a natural place to turn for clarification. Yet even within this literature, there’s still substantial disagreement as to how harm should be understood. Among other things, debates arise regarding whether harm is best defined in a comparative or non-comparative sense, whether it should be viewed as a state or an event, and even whether we should retain a philosophical concept of harm to begin with.

For feminist philosophers, a larger problem with current accounts of harm may lie outside of these debates. As Shannon Dea notes, standard or mainstream philosophical views of harm are often “highly idealized” (304), meaning theorists have traditionally relied on simplified or abstracted conditions when developing accounts. As a result, “much of the literature on harm has proceeded by way of thought experiments and toy examples, and reveals very little awareness of or concern for acute real world harms” (304). In particular, by ignoring non-ideal conditions, these accounts typically abstract away from social factors like structural injustice, domination, coercion, and exploitation.

Given that feminist philosophers view agents as socially embedded and impacted by these very factors, an obvious question arises: in statements of ‘x harms S,’ does it matter who S is in a socially embedded sense? In other words, is a person’s social location (consisting of social identity factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, etc., as well as social relations and roles affected by these identities) relevant to our understanding of harm?

Social Location and Harm

To begin answering this question, let’s first look at how social location might affect harm at the individual level. These are the harms that standard accounts tend to focus on exclusively, and the impact of social and systemic factors is less obvious at this level than at that of group or collective harm. I argue, however, that even at the individual level, analysis of social location is often needed for an acceptable theory of harm. To get a sense of why this is the case, we can look at a common example used in the harm scholarship: disability.

As Dea explains, philosophers often “draw on various types of disability as the go-to example of a hypothetical harm” (204). Yet, advocates of a social model of disability have long argued that social factors greatly impact the existence or severity of harms associated with disability. Sara Goering, for instance, explains that “for many people with disabilities, the main disadvantage they experience does not stem directly from their bodies, but rather from their unwelcome reception in the world, in terms of how physical structures, institutional norms, and social attitudes exclude and/or denigrate them” (134).

To provide an example, imagine that two people, A and B, both become blind. A has access to assistive technology, accessible public services, and lives in a society where disability is not stigmatized. B, however, lives in a society with no accessibility, no relevant technology, and significant stigma. These factors will all lead to dramatically different experiences of blindness for A and B—although B likely experiences significant harm, A may not be harmed at all in virtue of becoming blind.

Disability, therefore, seems to be a clear example of social location’s relevance to harm, even at the individual level. The problem, however, is that a highly idealized view of harm often obscures the ways in which social and systemic factors are relevant. This undermines the accuracy of harm accounts when applied to those who fall outside of the idealized focus. For example, in discussing blindness, Matthew Hanser lists sight as a basic good for human beings—the loss of which constitutes a non-derivative harm. Elizabeth Harman, too, uses blindness as an example of a non-comparatively bad state, and Judith Jarvis Thomson states that a human being who is blind “fares simply badly” (438), claiming that any acceptable analysis of harm should yield that one is harmed if they are caused to be blind, as “a sighted person leads a thicker, richer life than a blind person does, and therefore gets more out of living” (452).

Here we can see the impacts of an idealized approach in practice. As Friedlaender argues, in many cases the non-ideal features being put aside are so fundamental to our understanding that they can’t be reintroduced afterward. As a result, the approach leaves us with accounts of harm that are often not applicable in complex, real-world instances.

Implications for Feminist Theorizing

By ignoring non-ideal social conditions, current theories of harm are therefore prone to inaccuracies. This is a problem for analyses of harm in general. However, it poses a particular problem for feminist work. As noted earlier, feminist theorists often appeal to harm when analyzing oppression in a range of domains. Standard theories of harm create several issues for these aims specifically.

First, the identification of oppressive harms requires an analysis of social location. For instance, Cudd argues that the harms associated with oppression are always wrongs—“to make a claim of oppression is to show that the harms involved are unjustified” (23). However, not all harms are wrongs—for example, I may harm someone while acting in self-defense without wronging them—and determining whether a given harm constitutes a wrong often requires attending to the very factors that standard accounts neglect.

Taking an example from Young, if someone’s apartment application is rejected because they didn’t comply with a standard landlord down payment policy, we may be inclined to say they are harmed but not necessarily wronged. It’s only when we begin looking at the person’s social location (or their “social-structural” position as per Young) and the various social factors that make them unable to comply (e.g., rising cost of housing, sex-segregated labor markets, structural inequities in education) that we see this as an example of injustice constitutive of oppressive harm.

In addition, many harms of concern to feminists occur at the group level itself, given that oppression is primarily a group phenomenon. However, another implication of an idealized approach is that standard views often struggle to account for a notion of group harm. Thomas Simon explains how one way group harm can occur is when “the harm directed against a member of the group lowers the threshold of vulnerability for other group members” (133). Yet, harm theorists typically overlook the fact that people may become more vulnerable to harm due to non-ideal social conditions.

Instead, when discussing differences in harm susceptibility, they primarily consider cases like someone with a severe fear of blinking, or someone distressed over carpet lint. As a result, many view heightened vulnerability to harm as something that can be ignored. To provide some examples, Joel Feinberg argues that it is only the person of normal vulnerability whose interests are to be protected, as “if a sneeze causes a glass window to break, we should blame the weakness or brittleness of the glass and not the sneeze” (50). Thomson similarly argues that harm to those more vulnerable should be allotted “less weight according as it is caused only to those of abnormal susceptibility” (387). By focusing only on “normal” susceptibility, then, standard theories necessarily neglect the changes in vulnerability required for identifying the sort of interconnected group-level harm that is typical of oppression.

These issues demonstrate the extent to which the current harm literature is ill-equipped to support feminist theorizing on oppression. However, I argue that explicitly connecting the use of ideal theory methodology to the problems within this scholarship highlights a new set of prospects for understanding harm in a non-idealized sense.

Toward a Feminist Account of Harm

What exactly such an account should look like, however, is a separate question. In what follows, I aim to present an alternate view of harm that feminists might appeal to—one that ties harm to adverse impacts on well-being, where well-being is understood in a relational sense.

To motivate this view, first note that feminist concerns surrounding harm are closely tied to a widespread interest in the well-being of certain groups. Feminists often make comparative claims about how well the lives of those in different social positions go, and standards of good relationships, as well as personal and community flourishing, are regular features of feminist theorizing. In many ways, then, feminist work on oppression (wherein the concept of harm abounds) is rooted in a fundamental concern about well-being.

This focus can be further justified by appealing to the existing harm literature, where well-being is itself an implicit or underlying feature of many standard accounts. In recent work, Jens Johansson and Olle Risberg draw on this insight to argue that standard theories largely do not take seriously enough the centrality of well-being to our understanding of harm. More specifically, they argue that deviations from a focus on well-being (e.g., viewing harm in relation to interests or autonomy) have led to problematic accounts of harm, and that centering our understanding of harm around negative impacts on well-being provides a legitimate account in its own right.

However, Johansson and Risberg don’t include any definition of well-being in their account. In order to ensure that a novel theory of harm addresses relevant non-ideal conditions, I aim to provide a specific view of how well-being should be understood.

Though well-being is a central concept in philosophy, it too is canonically understood as highly individualistic and idealized. As feminist theorists have long pointed out, this traditional view is inadequate when it comes to addressing the impact that social and systemic factors often have on well-being. As such, a feminist view of well-being seems like a far more suitable foundation for a theory of harm that caters to feminist theorizing.

One major feature of feminist accounts of well-being is their focus on a relational view of the self, or what Charlotte Knowles describes as “a picture of the self that involves a recognition of its socially embedded nature” (70). In drawing on the umbrella of relational theory, these approaches focus both on understanding the impacts of personal relationships and the wider social and structural relations of which they are a part.

Based on this, I define harm in terms of adverse impacts on relational well-being. Among other things, such a definition could explain why social location is important to analyses of harm, drawing attention to the ways in which various personal, social, and structural relations can impact well-being at both the individual and group levels.

For example, when looking at disability, a relational view of harm would require us to consider individuals’ access to accessible services, resources, and social supports—all of which are influenced by societal attitudes and institutional structures. Similarly, in the context of group well-being, a relational lens helps us to identify the interconnected nature of vulnerability, explaining why harm to one member of a group can harm others as well.

Though much more work is needed to develop this idea, my hope is that adopting a relational view of well-being on which to build a new account of harm might provide feminists with a more suitable foundation for analyzing the harms associated with oppression.

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Clair Baleshta

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Clair Baleshta (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at Western University. She received her undergraduate degree in Knowledge Integration from the University of Waterloo, minoring in Philosophy and Mathematics, and her MA in Philosophy from the University of Guelph. She specializes in feminist philosophy, bioethics, and AI ethics. Her current research focuses on developing a feminist account of harm reduction, part of which involves determining how ‘harm’ itself should be understood in this context.