Feinberg, Joel (1926–2004)

Feinberg, Joel(1926–2004)

Joel Feinberg was a noted moral, social, political, and legal philosopher. He was born in Detroit, Michigan. After his military service in World War II, Feinberg earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). His doctoral dissertation was titled "Naturalism and Liberalism in the Philosophy of Ralph Barton Perry" (1957).

It was not until 1960, when Feinberg was thirty-three years old, that he published his first philosophical essay. During the next four decades, while Feinberg taught at Brown, Princeton, UCLA, Rockefeller, and Arizona, his scholarly output was prodigious. Within a few years of his arrival at the University of Arizona, the philosophy department there attracted several other prominent philosophers and become one of the most highly regarded programs in the United States. Feinberg was honored by his philosophical peers in 1981 by being elected president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. In 1988, he was one of the first individuals to be designated Regents Professor at the University of Arizona.

Liberalism was Feinberg's focus throughout his long and distinguished career. During the 1980s, he wrote his magnum opus, the four-volume, 1,397-page Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Feinberg's aim in this work (which he called his "tetralogy") was "to make the best possible case for liberalism" with respect to the moral limits of the criminal law (Harm to Others, p.

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