Harm to Self [Paperback]

This is the third volume of Joel Feinberg's highly regardedThe Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, a four-volume series in which Feinberg skillfully addresses a complex question: What kinds of conduct may the state make criminal without infringing on the moral autonomy of individual citizens? InHarm to Self, Feinberg offers insightful commentary into various notions attached to self-inflicted harm, covering such topics as legal paternalism, personal sovereignty and its boundaries, voluntariness and assumptions of risk, consent and its counterfeits, coercive force, incapacity, and choice of death.

An admirably lucid attempt to reinvoke and strengthen the liberal core of Mill's theory....[The book's] great merit is to have consistently argued the case against paternalistic legislation in relation to specific areas of legal policy and legislative debate. Not only does Feinberg convincingly make the case that no area of interference into the domain of self-regarding action is trivial...but he also persuasively pursues all the policy implications and moral connotations of the various contemporary legal test cases of the contours of individual privacy. --Times Higher EducationSupplement

Because of his focus on the moral limits of the criminal law, Feinberg develops, with characteristic subtlety and illumination, an account of what he calls failures of consent in two-party cases: when does the consent on the part of the party harmed to the action of another harming him or herfailto make the other's action legally permissible and so justify criminal prohibitions of the other's harmful conduct?....[A] first-rate work...of moral philosophy...contain[s] richly detailed and illuminating discussions of a host of issues concerning paternalism and deserve[s] [a] central place...in the contemporary debate over it. --Ethics