 What, then, is the argument for the claim that such a significant mistake in reasoning has been made? The first step in unwinding that mistake is to clarify that when we say an act makes a person worse off, we are not trying to press the claim that the act makes the person worse off than that person would have been had that act not been performed. The simple, counterfactual, “but for,” account of harm that kind of effort involves was – rightly – rejected decades ago. An alternative position is that an act makes a person worse off at a given world if there is some alternate act agents could have performed instead at an alternate world that would have made things better for that person at that alternate world. If, in other words, it is (physically and metaphysically) possible for agents to make things better for a given person – if such an alternate world is accessible relative to the one world – then what the agents have done makes things worse for, and, we can say, harms, that person. For defense of a maximizing account of harm, see Roberts 2011, Roberts 2009, 209–217, and Roberts 2007. For critical discussion of the simple counterfactual account and the alternative maximizing account of harm, see Carlson forthcoming. For a reconstruction and defense of the simple counterfactual account, see Klocksiem 2012. 