Psychologist Nick Haslam writes about “concept creep,” which describes the way that perceptions of harm have been rapidly evolving: Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to capture quantitatively less extreme phenomena.15
