Thick and thin accounts of social harm

Social harm is a concept on the rise in criminology and zemiology, yet one that remains under-theorised. This article argues that existing accounts misclassify certain harms, are anthropocentric, and struggle to struggle to account for variance in what makes someone or something’s life go best. I argue that these issues can be addressed though distinguishing between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ accounts of social harm. Thin accounts provide us with formal statements about what is affected when someone or something is harmed (harm’s medium), what the baseline is for assessing whether this thing has been impacted (harm’s structure), and what makes a harm social (harm’s social ontology). Thick accounts add a final, crucial, ingredient: a subject-dependent substantive theory of whatever we take to be harm’s medium (harm’s currency). I then offer a thin account of social harm that avoids the challenges faced by existing accounts by treating wellbeing as harm’s medium, events which negatively affect someone’s wellbeing as harm’s structure, and human actions as structuring causes as its social ontology.