Subjective vs. Objective Harm

Epistemic status: provisional.

See also Who You Are vs. What You Are.

Subjective harm is experiential and damages the state you are in, and is inherently temporary, while objective harm damages who or what you are, and is inherently permanent unless remedied.

What defines a person? In a weak sense, we are all that we experience. Everything that you experience is part of your experience body. In the strongest sense, we are who we are. We have preferences, and we choose to change them. But there may be a grey area in between, between "who" and "experience body". "What" you are (perhaps your physical strengths, or social roles, or something like that) is not exactly just the state you are in, nor your character.

Was Jesus harmed on the cross? Yes, his experience body was harmed. No, his character was unharmed. Was he harmed in the sense of "what" in any way? His physical body was harmed. A body can be made out of experience, but there may be another dimension. Was it harmed permanently? If experience is inherently temporary, then what is permanent about a person is how God sees them. He's the one who recreates our experience bodies whenever we exit unconsciousness. So in his eyes, was there any change in what Jesus was? No. "What" Jesus was was stored in God's mind and will and could be trivially restored into an experience body of Jesus' own (and was, when Jesus was resurrected). Jesus was only harmed subjectively, but not objectively.

But when Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, his body had wounds. So maybe "what" he was was damaged in God's eyes by the resurrection? I could ask, which would Legitimacy prefer, the Jesus who had been faithful and died (confirming the validity of Legitimacy by Jesus, a member of Legitimacy, being willing to bear the burden of human death), or the Jesus who hadn't done that? Real harm is destruction of true value, and God is the judge of that.

Maybe the body that is more "true" (if not more "beautiful") is Jesus' wounded body and Legitimacy prefers truth over beauty (or what we conventionally think of as beauty). In the vision of Revelation, Jesus is both perfect- and powerful-looking (arguably) with (Rev. 1:14-15) "His head and his hair were white as white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace. His voice was like the voice of many waters." It doesn't say there either way whether he had wounds. The vision later (5:6) shows a lamb who appeared to be slain, which from the text I would assume is Jesus. I imagine a lamb with blood on its neck. My interpretation is that at the end of time Jesus will be both in some sense perfect (or impressive in the conventional sense, which we call "perfection" and which we apply to beauty and power) and in some sense wounded.

Whatever a person is supposed to be according to Legitimacy, they will be, unless through their decisions ("who" they are), they limit God (Legitimacy). Even the damage done to "what" you are, done by other people, can be restored, because God can separate any two people so that they don't interact with each other, and then he can restore the damaged one. But the damage done to "who" you are, can only be remedied by you, and sometimes damaged relationships and thus social roles won't come back, if one or both of the people involved are no longer "who" they used to be.