Philosophical complications of epigenetic benefit and harm

Philosophy offers tools identifying events as beneficial or harmful to an individual’s well-being. There are three prominent and well-theorized accounts of benefit and harm: the counterfactual comparative, temporal comparative, and non-comparative account. Issues related to identity, determination, and causality trouble the traditional three accounts of benefit and harm. Advances in knowledge about epigenetic mechanisms have furthermore uncovered the complexities of the interactions between environmental circumstances and gene expression. This article gives an overview on the challenges of the traditional conceptualizations of benefit and harm in light of the epigenetic paradigm. It is argued that the latter prompts re-thinking standard cases that have been previously viewed as straightforward cases of cause-and-effect harms on particular individuals. In particular, this contribution criticizes that current approaches operate with conceptions of biological identity that separate the embodied consequences of beneficial/harmful events from identity itself. On the basis of feminist scholarship, it is demonstrated that the circularity of lived experience, epigenetic change, and embodied consequences is co-constitutive of identity. This challenges the three accounts of benefit and harm and provokes methodological adjustments towards multi-dimensional and relational conceptualizations in order to understand harm and benefit in their full biological, embodied, and sociocultural expansions.