The Philosophy of Joel Feinberg*

This paper is offered as a tribute to Joel Feinberg. The first section of the paper applies Feinberg’s analysis of freedom of expression to a contemporary case of academic freedom. The second section engages Feinberg’s work on rights and punishment. The paper ends with numerous quotations from Feinberg’s vast array of writings, words that express his ideas on a number of important problems that occupied his mind throughout his fruitful and influential career.     

Feinberg on the Criterion of Moral Personhood

In a very influential paper, Abortion, Joel Feinberg offers a series of arguments against four popular proposals for the criterion of moral personhood and defends a fifth proposal. In this paper, I demonstrate that two widely-accepted arguments employed by Feinberg against the modified species criterion and the strict potentiality criterion, respectively, are unsound. Moreover, I argue that there is a general feature of his inquiry into the criteria for moral personhood which undermines his efforts to argue convincingly either in favour of his own candidate or against other candidates.     

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