Joel Feinberg

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The term “pornographic” is a purely descriptive word referring to sexually explicit writing and pictures designed to induce sexual excitement in the reader or observer. To use the terms “obscene” and “pornographic” interchangeably, as if they referred to the same thing, is to beg the question of whether any or all pornographic materials are obscene. Whether any given acknowledged form of pornography is really obscene is an open question to be settled by argument and not by definitional fiat. The following subjects are discussed: the contrast between pornographic writing and literature and drama; artful pornography; pornographic pictorial art, poetry, and program music; how sex can be obscene; the feminist case against pornography; and violent pornography.

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.

Obscene words have the capacity to offend and shock listeners, and in some cases even fill with dread and horror. The class of words that are either obscene, totally disreputable, or naughty enough to be forbidden, is diverse and heterogeneous. These include sexual vulgarities, other “dirty words”, political labels, ethnic slurs, insulting terms, and religious blasphemies. Obscene-to-naughty words and phrases can be classified into two main categories: profanities and vulgarities. Derivative uses of obscenity are discussed.

Invective has various uses including expressive intensification, bandinage, calumny, insult, challenge, and provocation. For many of these uses, obscene words can advance the purposes of the speaker, but are inessential and self-defeating in many cases. The relation between some of the most common styles of invective and older forms of malediction, the uses of invective, the doctrine of fighting words and its difficulties, the role of obscenity in invective, and derivative uses of obscenity are 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.

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.