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Vaniver comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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Not everyone has harm (avoidance) as their primary moral value; many people would voluntarily accept harm to have more purity, autonomy, or economic efficiency, to give three examples.
If a moral theory accepted and acted upon by all moral people led to an average decrease in suffering, I'd take that as a sign that it was doing something right. For example, if no one initiated violence against anyone else (except in self defense), I have a hard time imagining how that could create more net suffering though it certainly would create more suffering for the subset of the population who previously used violence to get what they wanted.
While I definitely value autonomy (and, to a lesser extent, some sorts of purity), and would trade away some pleasure or happiness to get those things, a theory of harm could include autonomy, purity, etc., by counting lack of satisfaction of preferences for those things as harm.
I mean harm as one of the moral foundations. It seems like a five-factor model of morality fits human intuitions better than contorting everything into feeding into one morality and calling it 'harm' or 'weal' or something else.
That's usually the result of confusion.
That story strikes me as accepting harm to have more economic activity. I was thinking more of trading off physical or emotional health for wealth-generating abilities or opportunities, or institutions which don't invest in care and thus come off as soulless.
I don't think that very many people would except extreme harm to have these things, though. I used to think that I valued some non-experiential things very strongly, but I don't think that I was taking seriously how strong my preference not to be tortured is. And for most people I don't think there are peak levels of those three things that could outweigh torture.