Giving the Property of «Compensability» to Harm Caused to Human Health through the Construction of Indirect Damages: Problems of Legal Understanding and Law Enforcement

The paper is devoted to assessing the validity of the approach to understanding the harm caused to human health when such harm, in order to ensure its «recoverability», is fictitiously identified with a conditional set of losses arising in the propriotory environment of the victim as the consequences of the act committed by the offender (indirect, vicarious losses). The author proves that, being the most frequently broadcast in the doctrine of Russian tort law under the slogans about the special value of such an intangible good as health, this opinion does not correspond to its true legal nature and, when used in law enforcement practice, it creates additional obstacles in the implementation of the principle of full compensation for harm. Applying foreign experience, the author substantiates that the extension of the construction of indirect damages to the legal relations under consideration, as well as giving independent legal significance to the fact of the occurrence of adverse property consequences on the side of the injured person, in isolation from the content of physical harm as an actual consequence of the offense, does not serve this principle. It is noted that the formula widely used in the scientific literature «restoration of the previous state in case of injury to health or death is impossible» has played a negative role in theory and practice in determining the concept of such harm and its compensation. The author proposes to use an integrated approach to characterizing harm to health, in which disorders of individual body functions are investigated not only from the perspective of the violations or limitations of physiological functions of the body, but also in the context of their significance for the main categories of human activity (ability to work, self-service, independent movement, orientation, communication, etc.).

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