Joel Feinberg

Obscenity is the language of impiety, irreverence, and disrespect. Some use it to convey a disrespectful attitude towards a person or platitude, while others use it to reject the prevailing norms of propriety. The meanings of the terms euphemism, cacophemism, prophemism, and disphemism are explained. The reaction to excessive euphemization, two strategies for ridding the language of obscene words, the phenomenon of dirty-mindedness, and the case for retaining the obscene vocabulary are discussed.

The offense principle requires that an unpleasant state of mind or offense be produced wrongfully by another party, but not that it be an offense in the strict sense of ordinary language. The legislative problem of determining when offensive conduct is a public or criminal nuisance could be expressed, with equal accuracy, as a problem about determining the extent of personal privacy or autonomy. The former way of describing the matter lends itself to talk of balancing the independent value or reasonableness of the offending conduct against the seriousness of the offense cause, whereas the latter way lends itself to talk of drawing boundaries between the various private domains of persons, and between private domains of a person and the public world.

A wholesale ban on uttering or writing obscene words cannot be justified even by the principle of legal moralism. Moreover, the offense principle cannot justify the criminal prohibition of the utterance of obscenities in public places even when these are intentionally used to cause offense. The use of obscene words can only be made criminal when it is an unjustified, deliberately imposed nuisance. This form of nuisance is a kind of harassment, and the fact that it employs obscene words is by no means essential to its moral gravamen. Obscenity in the media is discussed.

The legitimacy of criminal law’s concern with offensiveness even in the absence of harm or danger must rest on the intuitive force of the examples given, most of which have been made as extreme as possible and depicted with uncompromising vividness. The seriousness of an offense is determined by four standards: the magnitude of the offense, the standard of reasonable avoidability, the Volenti maxim, and the discounting of abnormal susceptibilities. Having determined the seriousness of a given category of offense based on these standards, the legislator will proceed to balance that seriousness against the reasonableness of various kinds of conduct that can produce it.

This article defends the ethical theory of william wollaston against the objections of hume and later writers who uncritically accepted hume's account of what wollaston said. I then argue that the true flaws in wollaston's view that all wrongdoing is false representing are that it cannot explain why some immoral acts are worse than others, And it presupposes antecedent moral principles of a different kind. I conclude that wollaston's theory, While failing as a general account of all immorality, Can nevertheless be used to explain the difference between actions that are specifically unjust and actions that are immoral in other ways

The principle of legal paternalism justifies state coercion to protect individuals from self-inflicted harm, or in its extreme version, to guide them, whether they like it or not, toward their own good. Parents can be expected to justify their interference in the lives of their children on the ground that “daddy knows best.” legal paternalism seems to imply that since the state often can know the interests of individual citizens better than the citizens know them themselves, it stands as a permanent guardian of those interests in loco parentis. Put in this blunt way, paternalism seems a preposterous doctrine. If adults are treated as children they will come in time to be like children. Deprived of the right to choose for themselves, they will soon lose the power of rational judgment and decision. Even children, after a certain point, had better not be “treated as children,” else they will never acquire the outlook and capability of responsible adults.