In Defense of Non-Comparative Harm

Congratulations to Rachel Taylor-Fergusson, who successfully defended her MA thesis entitled "In Defense of Non-Comparative Harm" on August 26, completed under the supervision of Allen Habib.  The thesis argues that the typical account of harm, which provides an assessment of harm as causing an individual to be “worse off” than they otherwise would have been, fails in a variety of cases. It advances Elizabeth Harman's alternative account, which assesses harm on the grounds that an individual is caused to be in a "bad state". Harman's list of bad states is: "pain, mental or physical discomfort, disease, deformity, disability, or death" (Harman, 2009, p. 139). Rachel modifies Harman's list of bad states to include only those states which are intrinsically bad (bad by their very nature) and exclude those that are instrumentally bad (bad because of what they bring about). As such, she excludes disease, deformity, and disability from Harman’s list.

Rachel is beginning a Master of Education at Thompson Rivers University this fall. She is interested in studying Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning in the context of asynchronous eLearning course development. She intends to return to the University of Calgary to pursue a PhD upon completion of the MEd.