Harm has received significant attention recently in moral and analytical philosophy, where numerous scholars have sought to generate watertight accounts of its nature. In this chapter, I examine several of the most influential and compelling of these accounts. Drawing again on Bradley's desiderata, I consider the counterfactual comparative account, Shiffrin (1999) and Harman's (2009) non- comparative accounts, and Johansson and Risberg's (2023) negative influence on wellbeing account. Having subjected them to this trial by fire, I argue that Johansson and Risberg's negative influence on wellbeing account stands out as the most promising. It can account for pro tanto and overall harms, harms affecting non- human entities, and harms perpetrated by non- human animals and other entities. I therefore detail how Johansson and Risberg's (2023) general account of harm might be adapted to a narrower account of social harms by incorporating Yar's (2012a) insights on the link between social harm and human actions and inactions. I conclude by highlighting the numerous advantages of this adapted version of Johansson and Risberg's account and argue that we might readily retain the insights of Pemberton, Yar and Raymen's accounts through adopting it.

The counterfactual comparative account

For proponents of counterfactual comparative accounts, someone suffers harm when they become worse off than they otherwise would have been. Such accounts are so named because they define harm by comparing actual states of affairs to counterfactual scenarios (what would have happened otherwise). The counterfactual comparative account has many proponents (Feinberg, 1986; Parfit, 1987; Klockseim, 2012; Feit, 2023) and has been formulated in several ways. Klockseim (2012: 285), for example, formulates it as follows