On the morality of harm: a response to Sousa, Holbrook and Piazza.

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: The paper by Sousa, Holbrook and Piazza (SH&P) appears to have two distinct aims. First, it advances a number of criticisms of the argument developed in Kelly, Stich, Ha-ley, Eng, and Fessler (2007), which was aimed at showing that a cluster of claims often attributed to Elliott Turiel and his followers are mistaken. Second, it proposes a new hypothesis about how people think about harmful actions and presents some valuable new data in support of that hypothesis. We will address each of these in turn. We should begin by saying that we welcome the new data presented by SH&P. However, we do not agree that those data pose a problem for the argument advanced by Kelly et al. Indeed, we think the new data support the central claim made in Kelly et al. concerning how people think about transgressions in which someone is harmed. We suspect that SH&P may have misunderstood Kelly et al.'s argument , and that this misunderstanding, rather than any substantive disagreement, underlies many of their critical comments about the Kelly et al. paper. In Section 2, we will do our best to correct this misunderstanding by making clear exactly what Kelly et al. do (and do not) claim. We will then explain why we view the SH&P data as providing further support for Kelly et al.'s critique of the Turiel-inspired hypothesis they focused on. We will also briefly address SH&P's contention that Kelly et al. have misinterpreted the view of Turiel and his associates. In Section 3, we will turn our attention to the new hypothesis proposed by SH&P. Our main theme, in that section, will be that SH&P have failed to take note of an important distinction between two kinds of rights, and that when the distinction is duly noted, their hypothesis is best viewed as a claim about the rationality of people's thinking about one class of harm transgressions. Once this point has been made, it becomes clear that there is an obvious way to generalize SH&P's hypothesis well beyond the domain of harmful transgressions. Ironically, if the generalized hypothesis turns out to be true, then harm is not playing a significant role in …