Joel Andrew Lee Feinberg

The author questions himself about what is known as “the paradox of blackmail,” that is, the fact that blackmail is the result of the combination of two ways of behaving which are often both lawful if taken individually, but unlawful once they are connected. The author also examines whether the harm principle typical of liberal orders provides the justification (the rationale) for the assumption of blackmail as a crime, or whether it is instead necessary to turn to another justificatory basis: the exploitation principle. However, as this principle leads to legal moralism, it opposes a liberal ethics. Thus, one is faced with the dilemma of either accepting the harm principle thus decriminalizing blackmail, or accepting the exploitation principle and going against principles of liberalism. To escape this dilemma the author distinguishes between various types (five categories) of blackmail, concluding that only non‐paradoxical types fit the common‐sense expectation of criminalization.

Harmless Wrongdoing is the final volume in a four‐volume work entitled The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law that examines the kinds of harm that a state legitimately may make criminal. Of the four liberty‐limiting, or coercion‐legitimizing, principles that Feinberg examines, he accepts only the harm principle and the offense principle as morally relevant reasons for establishing criminal prohibitions. In this fourth volume, Feinberg considers and opposes the principle of legal moralism, according to which legal coercion is legitimate to prevent immoral conduct whether or not that conduct harms anyone. Feinberg examines various forms of legal moralism: including: (1) moral conservatism, which endorses legal coercion that may prevent drastic change to a group's way of life; (2) strict moralism, which supports legal coercion against nongrievance evils that are inherently immoral; (3) the exploitative principle, which recommends criminal prohibitions against substantial, unjustly exploitive, free‐floating evils; and (4) legal perfectionism, which combines moralism with paternalism in approving legal coercion that benefits an individual's character. In his defense of liberalism, Feinberg makes some concessions to legal moralism, but maintains that only harm to others and offense to others have sufficient weight to legitimize legal coercion.

Harm to Others is the first volume in a four‐volume work entitled The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law that addresses the question, What acts may the state rightly make criminal? Feinberg identifies four liberty‐limiting, or coercion‐legitimizing, principles, each of which is the subject of a volume of his book. In the first volume, Feinberg looks at the principle of harm to others – or the harm principle – which John Stuart Mill identified as the only liberty‐limiting principle. The other principles that Feinberg considers in subsequent volumes are (1) the offense principle: it is necessary to prevent hurt or offense (as opposed to harm) to others; (2) legal paternalism: it is necessary to prevent harm to the actor herself; and (3) legal moralism: it is necessary to prevent immoral conduct whether or not it harms anyone. As a thinker who favors liberalism, Feinberg rejects legal paternalism and legal moralism, maintaining that the harm principle and the offense principle exhaust the class of morally relevant reasons for criminal prohibitions. Feinberg's examination of the harm principle begins with an account of the concept of harm and its relation to other concepts like interests, wants, hurts, offenses, rights, and consent. After addressing difficult examples such as moral harm, vicious harm, prenatal harm, and posthumous harm, Feinberg considers both the moral status of a failure to prevent harm and the problems related to assessing, comparing, and imputing harms.

This book is the second in a four-volume work entitled The Moral Limits of Criminal Law, which examines the acts that the state may make criminal. It focuses on the issue of offense, presenting a detailed analysis of offensive behavior and how it is more a nuisance than a menace. It identifies the different kinds of offenses and the standards for evaluating their seriousness. The issue of obscenity is analyzed within the context of pornography and the Constitution. Obscene words, their functions, and social and legal implications are also discussed.

One who is responsible tout court may be contrasted either with irresponsible persons or with non-responsible (incompetent) persons. Calling one responsible may be either merely describing, or it may be ascribing certain excellences of character. Praising a person for being generally responsible may indicate his/her willingness to take on new liability when s/he has a duty or responsibility to do so, or it may point to virtues which make for effective use of discretion, or it may be certification of moral trustworthiness. Common to all the states opposed to responsibility is a kind of unfitness for prospective or retrospective judgments of liability. Responsibility for... provides the contextual background for responsibilities tout court and also for the unity underlying their various ambiguities.One who is generally responsible in the “on balance” sense is responsible in all senses of the word. S/he is (all told) neither non-responsible, nor irresponsible, nor unresponsible and is a safe bet for assignments of prospective liability in virtue of good judgment, self-reliance, and trustworthiness. To describe him or her is to portray an ideal---not the only ideal that philosophical moralists have prescribed for human conduct and character---but an ideal peculiarly adapted to the needs of the modern world.

This is the third volume of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, a four‐volume series in which Joel Feinberg addresses a complex question: What kinds of conduct may the state make criminal without infringing on the moral autonomy of individual citizens? In Harm to Self, Feinberg discusses various problems about self‐inflicted harm, covering topics such as legal paternalism, personal sovereignty and its boundaries, voluntariness and assumptions of risk, consent and its counterfeits, coercive force, incapacity, and choice of death.

The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses.

This leading anthology contains essays and cases written by some of the most influential figures in legal philosophy, representing the major theoretical positions in the field. Its primary focus is to relate traditional themes of legal philosophy to the concerns of modern society in a way that invigorates the former and illuminates the latter. This classic text is distinguished by its clarity and accessibility, balance of topics, balance of positions on controversial questions, topical relevance, imaginative use of cases and stories, and the inclusion of only lightly edited or untouched legal classics. This revision is distinguished by its inclusion of new material on law and economics, international law, distributive justice, religion and freedom of expression, feminist legal theory, and critical race theory, as well as a greater emphasis on concrete legal problems.

REASON AND RESPONSIBILITY: READINGS IN SOME BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, 16th Edition, has a well-earned reputation for clarity and breadth, with a selection of high-quality readings that cover centuries of philosophical debate. The anthology covers the central issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and ethics, as well as debates over the value of philosophy and the meaning of life. The book is clearly organized: the readings complement each other, guiding you through contrasting positions on key philosophical issues. Clear, concise introductions provide reading tips and background information to help you engage directly and meaningfully with the primary sources.

There are conceptual riddles concerning the scope of the term 'harm', three of which provide the excuse for this essay, namely, whether there can be such things as purely moral harms (harm to character), vicarious harms (as I shall call them), and posthumous harms. My discussion of these questions will assume without argument the orthodox jurisprudential analysis of harm as invaded interest, not because I think that account is self-evidently correct or luminously perspicuous, but rather because I wish to explore its implications for the borderline cases of harm, the better to test its adequacy, and to determine the respects in which the concept of self-interest still need s clarification.

My main concern will be to show that it makes sense to speak of the rights of unborn generations against us, and that given the moral judgment that we ought to conserve our environmental inheritance for them, and its grounds, we might well say that future generations /do/ have rights correlative to our present duties toward them. Protecting our environment now is also a matter of elementary prudence, and insofar as we do it for the next generation already here in the persons of our children, it is a matter of love. But from the perspective of our remote descendants it is basically a matter of justice, of respect for their rights. My main concern here will be to examine the concept of a right to better understand how that can be.

REASON AND RESPONSIBILITY: READINGS IN SOME BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY has a well-earned reputation for clarity and breadth, with a proven selection of high-quality readings that cover centuries of philosophical debate. The anthology includes the central issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and ethics, as well as debates over the value of philosophy and the meaning of life. The book is clearly organized so that the readings complement each other, guiding readers through contrasting positions on key philosophical issues. Clear, concise introductions provide reading tips and background information to help readers engage directly and meaningfully with the primary sources. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Obscenity is an extreme form of offensiveness producing repugnance, shock, or disgust, although the offending materials can, at the same time, be alluring to some degree. The main feature that distinguishes obscene things from other repellant or offensive things is their blatancy: their massive obtrusiveness, their extreme and unvarnished bluntness, their brazenly naked exhibition. The three classes of objects that can be termed as “obscene” are: obscene natural objects, obscene persons, and obscene created things. There are three ways in which these objects can be offensive to the point of obscenity: by direct offense to the senses, by offense to lower order sensibilities, by offense to higher sensibilities.

The Supreme Court views the word “obscene” as akin to word “pornographic”. Nothing is “obscene” unless it tends to cause erotic states in the mind of the beholder, and anything that produces this kind of “psychic stimulation” is a likely candidate for the obscenity label whether or not the induced states are offensive to the person who has them or anyone else aware of them. Recent Supreme Court decisions on the permissibility of pornography, particularly the various judicial formulae the court has produced to deal with the problem, are reviewed. It is shown that the Court has vacillated between different legitimizing principles, applying either a liberal offense principle mediated by balancing tests or a thinly disguised moralism.

Profound offenses are misleadingly characterized as simply “offensive nuisances” because of their perceived qualitative difference from mere nuisances, and because of their independence of actual perception. The nub of the offensiveness in the “profound” cases is not personal resentment over a disagreeable experience, but outrage at the offending conduct on grounds quite independent of its effect on oneself. Examples of profound offenses include voyeurism, Nazis and Klansmen, execrated but “harmless” deviant religious moral practices, desecration of venerated symbols, and abortion and mistreatment of corpses. The offense principle does not warrant legal interference in a person’s private conduct on the grounds that those who know that the conduct is taking place need protection from the profound offensiveness of their own bare knowledge.

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.