NCJ Number
117963
Date Published
1986
Length
420 pages
Annotation
This third volume in a four-volume series on "The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law" examines issues in the State's intervention to prevent or punish persons in matters of self-harm.
Abstract
The opening chapter considers issues in "legal paternalism," which involves the State's rationale for proscribing acts that cause physical, psychological, or economic harm to the actor himself/herself. This is followed by a discussion of autonomy: conceptions of personal autonomy and autonomy as capacity, condition, ideal, and right. Issues in the discussion of personal sovereignty and its boundaries include one's right versus one's good, autonomous forfeitures of liberty and autonomy itself, and personal sovereignty compared with constitutional "privacy." A discussion of voluntariness and assumptions of risk uses the examples of dangerous drugs and the wearing of protective helmets when riding motorcycles. Some failures in voluntariness are discussed under the circumstances of external compulsion in risk-taking, ignorance and mistake in risk-taking, and neurosis. After discussing consent and its counterfeits, failures of consent are discussed under the concepts of coercive force, coercive offers, defective belief, and incapacity. The concluding chapter addresses issues in the State's intervention in matters affecting a person's choice of death. Chapter notes, subject index.