Autonomy and relational harms are less obviously injurious than physical harms, whereby a death or loss of physical functioning is prima facie harmful. Thus, this chapter in part serves to explain why the particular harms that are presented here should be considered to be injurious. Autonomy harms, as explained in detail in Chapter Two, result from situations that fundamentally disrupt our attempts to achieve self-actualisation. It is argued that self-actualisation is made possible through the achievement of a sufficient level of autonomy, which ensures an individual has the ability to formulate choices and the capacity to act on these. The chapter identifies relative poverty, child poverty, financial insecurity, youth unemployment and long working hours as conditions in which our autonomy is compromised due to lack of resources or opportunities. Relational harms, as described in Chapter Two, result from either an enforced exclusion from social networks, or the injurious nature of misrecognition. Given the paucity of comparative data – discussed in Chapter Three – social isolation is the only relational harm considered here. Thus, the analysis provided relates to the injuries that result when we are unable to sustain relationships or some form of meaningful human contact.

The chapter contributes to the empirical interrogation of the notion of preventable harm; again, as with the previous chapter, this analysis focuses on the variance between regimes and nation states in terms of the extent of these harms. It is certainly the case, particularly in relation to autonomy harms, that these are inextricably intertwined with the extraction of surplus value – a process integral to the capitalist economic model. Yet there is considerable variance in the experience of these harms, and, therefore, the analytical focus of the chapter falls on the ways in which different societies organise the features of the mode of production, to alter the forms that surplus value takes, as well as the extent to which our reliance on markets for income and services is tempered by welfare systems.

Relative poverty

Poverty is probably ‘the largest source of social harm; it causes more deaths, diseases, suffering and misery than any other social phenomena’ (Gordon, 2004, p 251).