论文标题
量化危害
Quantifying Harm
论文作者
论文摘要
在同伴论文（Beckers等，2022）中，我们定义了危害的定性概念：造成伤害，或者不是造成伤害。对于实际应用，我们通常需要量化伤害；例如，我们可能希望选择一组可能的干预措施的最大危害。我们首先在涉及一个人的确定性背景下对危害的定量定义，然后我们考虑处理不确定性的问题，从对单个人的危害概念到“社会伤害”的概念，涉及对个人造成损害的概念。我们表明，这样做的“显而易见”方式（仅对个人造成预期的伤害，然后将所有个人的预期危害总结可能会导致违反直觉或不适当的答案，并讨论替代方案，借鉴决策论文献中的工作。
In a companion paper (Beckers et al. 2022), we defined a qualitative notion of harm: either harm is caused, or it is not. For practical applications, we often need to quantify harm; for example, we may want to choose the lest harmful of a set of possible interventions. We first present a quantitative definition of harm in a deterministic context involving a single individual, then we consider the issues involved in dealing with uncertainty regarding the context and going from a notion of harm for a single individual to a notion of "societal harm", which involves aggregating the harm to individuals. We show that the "obvious" way of doing this (just taking the expected harm for an individual and then summing the expected harm over all individuals can lead to counterintuitive or inappropriate answers, and discuss alternatives, drawing on work from the decision-theory literature.
