Theoretically moral harm is not actually harmful but actually moral harm is harmful! What?

In a previous post, I conceded that moral harm is not actual harm. Moral harm is the moral judgment that actual natural harm OUGHT to result from breaking a moral law. For instance, the moral harm of a murder is the thought, concomitant with judgment that murder is immoral, that bad things ought to a result from this crime. Separable from this judgment that bad things ought to happen might be moral judgments that the bad things be the death of the killer.

The moral judgment that harm ought to result can be a factor in causing all sorts of unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Some are of these thoughts and feelings are guilt, shame, anxiety, anger and hatred. These unpleasant thoughts and feelings can be classed as natural harms. They are painful. But they are the causal effects of moral harm; not the moral harm itself. Moral harm can help cause actual natural harm because moral harm by virtue of being a moral judgment is a thought. Thoughts have causal consequences. The pains of moral harm can be spread beyond the perpetrator of an immoral act. For instance, a murderer may suffer guilt and fear while witnesses suffer anger.

Of course, another type of natural harm connected with moral harm are the bad consequences which ought to happen as a result of breaking a moral law, do happen. The most obvious cases of this are when society punishes a perpetrator. A subsequent post will focus on moral harm and punishment. Here the point is that the actual harm that so to speak is required by moral harm is not the moral harm.

I am updating my post with the following quotation from a review in July 18, 2019 edition of the New York Review of Books. It illustrates that feeling moral harm is painful, that moral harm is diffuse by not condemning only the perpetrator, and is connected with the religious notion of atonement. Orlando Figes is reviewing novels of the Russian writer Sergei Lebedev. Figes writes on p.42 “In Lebedev’s fiction, the desire to confront the Soviet past comes with a sense of being burdened by its crimes. In Oblivion, the narrator travels to the island because he wants to atone for the sins of Grandfather II, whose blood runs in his on veins.”

My book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism was released by Tate Publishing on March 11, 2014. See Book Web Page for information about the book. See pp. 72ff. for discussion of moral harm. Free copies can be obtained here by credit card by paying $3.75 for shipping and handling.

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