Joel Feinberg

Feinberg was internationally distinguished for his research in moral, social and legal philosophy. His major four-volume work, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, was published between 1984 and 1988. Feinberg held many major fellowships during his career and lectured by invitation at universities around the world. He was an esteemed and highly successful teacher, and many of his students are now prominent scholars and professors at universities across the US. His former students include Jules Coleman, Russ Shafer-Landau, and Clark Wolf.

Feinberg's most important contribution to legal philosophy is his four-volume book, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (1984-1988), a work that is frequently characterized as "magisterial." Feinberg's goal in the book is to answer the question: What sorts of conduct may the state rightly make criminal? John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), gives a staunchly liberal answer, that the only kind of conduct that the state may rightly criminalize is conduct that causes harm to others. Though Feinberg, who had read and re-read Mill's classic text many times, shared Mill's liberal leanings, he postulated that liberals can and should admit that certain kinds of non-harmful but profoundly offensive conduct can also properly be prohibited by law. In The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Feinberg sought to develop and defend a broadly Millian view of the limits of state power over the individual. In the process, he defended standard liberal positions on topics such as suicide, obscenity, pornography, hate speech, and euthanasia. He also analyzed nonmaterial concepts such as harm, offense, wrong, autonomy, responsibility, paternalism, coercion, and exploitation, conceding in the conclusion to the final volume that liberalism may not be fully defensible and that liberals ought to concede that there are rare cases where certain kinds of moral harms and harmless immoralities should be outlawed.

Feinberg studied at the University of Michigan, writing his dissertation on the philosophy of the Harvard professor Ralph Barton Perry under the supervision of Charles Stevenson. He taught at Brown University, Princeton University, UCLA and Rockefeller University, and, from 1977, at the University of Arizona, where he retired in 1994 as Regents Professor of Philosophy and Law.

In a 1974 paper, Feinberg addresses the possibility of legal rights for animals and future generations.

In a paper prepared in 1958 for the benefit of students at Brown, Feinberg seeks to refute the philosophical theory of psychological egoism, which in his opinion is fallacious. So far as he can tell, there are four primary arguments for it:

Joel Feinberg (October 19, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan – March 29, 2004 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and the authority of the state. Feinberg was one of the most influential figures in American jurisprudence of the last fifty years.