Consider the following case:
A tourist is hurrying to the airport to catch a plane and stops a taxi. However, the taxi driver is a racist and refuses to take the tourist, leading to her missing her flight. However, the missed flight crashes and most of the passengers die.
Therefore, did the taxi driver “harm” the passenger?
At first, it may be intuitive that since the driver prevented a greater harm, that of death, to the passenger, the end result implies that the taxi driver did not harm the passenger.
Utilitarianism, where the ends justify the means, seems to suggest that this racist action should be considered a good, rather than an evil.
However, a deontological argument, where the passenger in this case is seen as an end, rather than a means to the end (i.e. the plane crashing) would clearly justify this situation being coined a harmful action onto the passenger: a racist act such as this, when viewed through Kantian ethics, would disobey rational moral laws. After all, a moral action like discrimination cannot be universalised, as it is extremely difficult to justify racism as a universal rule. However, while such an argument would provide an alternative to its utilitarian counterpart, it is lacks persuasive power, as a utilitarian would disagree with the premise that one should work towards a rational goal, and that “harm” is defined as breaking universal laws rather than minimising utility. Instead, it is the nature of the two events themselves that need to be considered in order to make an argument that the taxi driver harmed the passenger in any sense, regardless of what “harm” is defined as.
The crucial step is acknowledging that the act of refusal and the plane crashing are in fact separate events. The taxi driver did not cause the plane to crash. He only caused the woman to miss the flight. Therefore, the act should be morally judged in isolation, which will cause it to be considered a harmful act, whether through a deontological or utilitarian lens. After all, if the plane had landed safely, the driver would have unambiguously harmed the passenger.
Therefore, what one perceives initially as the factor that makes the driver’s action morally harmless/ beneficial, refusing the taxi ride that happens to save the passenger’s life, is only seen in such a way due to “moral luck”; the driver did not refuse the taxi ride in order to prevent the passenger from catching her flight. The fact that the outcome happened to be beneficial is coincidental, not morally transformative, meaning that the action remains morally harmful.
Furthermore, one cannot argue that the action deserves moral credit, so by nature being beneficial and so not harmful, even if the consequence of the action remains a net positive one. To defend the action of the driver as morally presupposes agency: to be praised for an outcome, one must have intended, foreseen, or been guided by moral reasons in bringing it about. The taxi driver’s action was rooted in racial prejudice, not moral concern, and the survival of the tourist was an unintended and unpredictable result of his discriminatory refusal. To assign moral credit in such a case would be to confuse moral virtue with mere luck, thereby misrepresenting the nature of moral responsibility.
Establishing that such an action deserves no moral credit clearly brings us full circle to answer why the driver harmed the passenger, by allowing us to next examine why “harm” relies on a basis of moral credit. The concept of harm is not purely descriptive; it inherently carries normative weight. To say that someone has been harmed is not simply to state that
they experienced pain, loss, or disruption, but to assert that something bad happened to them in a way that ought not to have occurred. This implies a moral baseline: a set of expectations or values about how individuals should be treated, what kinds of suffering are unjustified, and what forms of human well-being deserve protection. Without such a framework, harm becomes indistinguishable from mere misfortune or neutral change:
If a tree is struck by lightning, we don’t say the tree was harmed in a morally relevant
sense.
If a person is struck by another person, we do call that harm due to the inherent intuition of the moral status of the victim and the norms violated.
What makes an experience count as harm, rather than just an event, is that it violates some moral claim, right, or expectation we think the person was entitled to. Thus, identifying harm is not just a matter of observing outcomes, but also of interpreting them through the lens of some sort of moral view. In this way, harm necessarily presupposes morality; to call something “harm” is already to make a moral judgment, even if one has no answer to the exact nature of what one bases such moral judgements.
Therefore, to answer whether the taxi driver harmed the passenger, one must go beyond the surface of outcomes and consequences (a purely utilitarian method) and examine the moral structure underlying the events.
- The refusal and the plane crash must be treated as distinct occurrences: the driver did not cause the crash, only the missed flight, which judged in in isolation reveals it as a harmful action.
- The fact that the passenger’s survival resulted from the missed flight is a case of moral luck: it was an unforeseeable outcome that cannot retroactively justify or cleanse the initial wrong.
- The driver’s action deserves no moral credit, as moral praise requires intention and
agency, both of which were absent in his racially motivated refusal.
Finally, to say the passenger was harmed is to make a moral judgment (i.e. to give or not give moral credit), rather than a merely a descriptive claim. Harm presupposes a normative standard about how people ought to be treated, and this standard was clearly violated.
Therefore, since we have established that the driver deserves no moral credit, the action constitutes harm. Furthermore, by no means does such an argument disprove that causing a passenger to miss a flight that will crash to be a more harmful choice than choosing to do nothing. Rather, it is the act of mirroring such a situation without a justified intent that
necessitates the driver’s action being labelled harmful.