Description:
Dealing with a diverse set of problems in practical and theoretical ethics, these fourteen essays, three of them previously unpublished, reconfirm Joel Feinberg's leading position in the field of legal philosophy. With a clarity and humor that will be familiar to readers of his other works, Feinberg writes on topics including "wrongful life" suits in the law of torts, or whether there is any sense in the remark that a person is so badly off that he would be better off not existing at all; the morality of abortion; educational options; free expression; civil disobedience; and the duty of easy rescue in criminal law. He continues with a three-part defense of moral rights in the abstract, a discussion of voluntary euthanasia, and an inquiry into arguments of various kinds for not granting legal rights in enforcement of a person's acknowledged moral rights. This collection concludes with two essays dealing with concepts used in appraising the whole of a person's life: absurdity and self-fulfillment, and their interplay.
Brief description: Joel Feinberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, is the author of the four-volume work The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Among his other collections of essays is Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton).
Review Quotes: "This volume collects twelve essays, all published in the last decade, by arguably the most persuasive and certainly the most lucid contemporary American liberal jurisprude."---Dena S. Davis, Religious Studies Review