Joel Feinberg

The nature and value of rights

4. Explain the notion of a sovereign right-monopoly. How would this work in Nowheresville according to Feinberg? Sovereign right-monopoly, if applied, will make people incur genuine obligations toward one another; but the obligations (heres the twist) will not be owed directly to promises, creditors, parents, and the like, but rather to God alone, or to the members of some elite, or to a single sovereign under God. Sovereign right-monopoly would work in Nowheresville by having delegated authorities empowered to give commands to their underlings and to punish them for their disobedience.

Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy

This volume of essays by one of Americas preeminent philosophers in the area of jurisprudence and moral philosophy gathers together fourteen papers that had been published in widely scattered and not readily accessible sources. All of the essays deal with the political ideals of liberty and justice or with hard cases for the application of the concept of a right.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Wrongful life and the counterfactual element in harming.

I shall be concerned in this paper with some philosophical puzzles raised by so-called “wrongful life” suits. These legal actions are obviously of great interest to lawyers and physicians, but philosophers might have a kind of professional interest in them too, since in a remarkably large number of them, judges have complained that the issues are too abstruse for the courts and belong more properly to philosophers and theologians. The issues that elicit this judicial frustration are those that require the application to border-line cases of such philosophically interesting concepts as acting, causing, and the one that especially interests me, harming. I first became interested in the concept of harming in my work on the moral limits of the criminal law, where I had to come to terms with John Stuart Mills famous “harm principle”–the principle that it is always a good reason in support of a criminal prohibition, indeed, the only legitimate reason, that it will prevent harm to persons other than the actor. I could not very well criticize that principle until I decided what the word “harm” must mean in its formulation. I gave what I took to be the requisite analysis of harm in my book Harm to Others . Here I wish to improve that analysis, examine its implications for civil as well as criminal liability, and test it on conceptually hard cases, especially cases of prenatal harming , that is, cases in which the wrongful causative conduct occurs before the victims birth, and the harmed state that is its upshot consists in being born in an impaired condition.

Absurd Self-Fulfillment

Richard Taylor adds a twist to the ancient legend of Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to perpetual life spent pushing a large rock to the top of a hill from which it falls down the other side, once more to be pushed to the top, and so on forever. “Let us suppose”, writes Taylor, “that the gods, while condemning Sisyphus to the fate just described, at the same time, as an afterthought, waxed perversely merciful by implanting in him a strange and irrational impulse, namely a compulsive impulse to roll stones ... e.g. through implanting some substance that has this effect on his character and drives”.1 Such a modification would be merciful but also ‘perverse’, Taylor maintains, because “from our point of view there is clearly no reason why anyone should have a persistent and insatiable desire to do something as pointless as that”.2

The Interest in Liberty on the Scales

There is one version of John Stuart Mill’s famous ‘harm principle’ for determining the moral limits of state coercion that is virtually beyond controversy. Few would deny that it is always a morally relevant reason in support of a proposed criminal prohibition that it is reasonably necessary (that is, that there are reasonable grounds for taking it to be necessary) to prevent harm or the unreasonable risk of harm to parties other than the persons whose conduct is to be constrained. Some might deny that the necessity to prevent harm to others is a sufficient reason for state coercion on the grounds that prevention of minor harms may not be worth the social costs of state intervention. Others might deny. that the prevention of harm to others is a necessary condition of justified interference on the grounds that there are other reasons for coercion (e. g. the prevention of mere offense, or the enforcement of morality as such) that can apply even to harmless behavior. But hardly anyone would deny that the need to prevent harm to others is always a reason in support of state coercion even if it is not always a conclusive reason, and even if it is not the only kind of reason that can apply.

Obscene words and the law

This paper asks whether the criminal law can have any legitimate concern with obscene language. At most, such a concern could be justified by the need to protect auditors from offense, since it is not plausible to think of exposure to dirty words as harmful or inherently immoral. A distinction is drawn between “bare utterance and instant offense,” on the one hand, and offensive nuisance and harassment, on the other. Only when obscene language is used to harass can it properly be made criminal. Finally, I criticize in some detail judicial reasoning in the case of F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, and conclude that obscene language on the public media is not properly subject to governmental regulation, whether- by criminal law or otherwise. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A9102008 00002