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For several decades the work of Joel Feinberg has been the most influential in legal, political and social philosophy in the English-speaking world. This 1994 volume honours that body of work by presenting fifteen essays, many of them by leading legal and political philosophers, that explore the problems that have engaged Feinberg over the years. Amongst the topics covered are issues of autonomy, responsibility and liability. It will be a collection of interest to anyone working in moral, legal or political (...) philosophy. (shrink)

1. Of all the great natural or human rights, none has been so neglected by scholars and theorists as the right to life. Today, the salient fact about this right is the considerable disagreement over its scope, form and status. Everyone has noticed the general inflationary effect of talk about ‘human’ rights in our time, in contrast to the tidy list of ‘natural’ rights drawn up by Locke and others. Nowhere is this ballooning more noticeable than in the right to (...) life itself. For Jefferson, his predecessors and contemporaries, the right to life was simple enough; it meant “the right not to be deprived of life, … a life that God gave and nature supported.” On this basis, it is natural to see the right to life classically as having reference mainly to questions affecting the termination of life. Without much imagination, one could find this right also relevant to another class of questions, those affecting the prevention of human life. However, when one historian cautiously remarked during the Great Depression that “the right to life could be interpreted as giving the individual at least an emergency claim on society for sustenance …,” we have a significant increase in the scope of protections allegedly afforded by this right. How far this ‘emergency claim’ might reach was indicated some years later in an essay addressed to U.N.E.S.C.O. The “right of living,” it was argued. (shrink)

In the theory of rights we repeatedly encounter the problem of reconciling someone’s having a right, with his properly suffering damage to the interest protected by the right. In the case of right to life, we have to assess numerous cases in which individuals are killed or allowed to die, and yet we wish nonetheless to affirm their right to life. These cases include killing an aggressor in self-defense, accidental homicide, terminating life-sustaining therapy, and capital punishment.