Philosophy Puzzles → Ethics → Feinberg’s Cabin
Feinberg’s Cabin
While hiking in the mountains, you suddenly find yourself stuck in a rapidly developing and unforeseeable blizzard. Faced with limited visibility and increasingly dangerous conditions, you breathe a sigh of relief to see a cabin. No one is inside, but fearing for your life, you break a window and crawl inside, remaining for a few days until the storm passes. During your stay in the cabin, you eat food in the pantry and burn some of the cabin’s wooden furniture to stay warm. Once leaving is safe, you stop by the local police station to explain the situation. The police contact the cabin’s owner, who you hear yelling on the other end of the phone. By sheltering in the cabin, you’ve trespassed and engaged in the destruction of property. Was staying in the cabin morally wrong? What does this tell us about legal rights? Do you owe the property owner compensation for the damage you caused?
A possible solution: Since my life was in peril, staying in the cabin was not morally wrong. My right to life is more fundamental than the cabin owner’s property rights. However, it would be morally wrong not to compensate the cabin owner for the damages I’ve done since I infringed on the cabin owner’s property rights in honouring my right to life. As the moral agent responsible for the damages, I have an obligation to correct the infringement. Now that I am safe, I will talk with the cabin owner and develop a plan to pay for the damages.
Joel Feinberg (IDK)
Joel Feinberg was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association
Keywords: Morality, Ethics, Joel Feinberg, Rights, 20th Century
This solution places moral rights and wrongs in a rights-based framework. By ordering rights in terms of importance, an explanation of why the hiker is not morally wrong but is morally responsible for the damage they’ve done emerges. My actions were not wrong, given that my life was in peril. Since infringing on the cabin owner’s rights is not morally wrong in this situation, Feinberg rejected legal rights as absolute - in other words, he argued that it is not always morally wrong to infringe on someone’s rights. However, since a right was infringed upon, the cabin’s owner is still entitled to compensation.
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Further Reading
Glossary
Instrumental Good: Something that gets you something else that’s good. For example, money is good because it gets you pizza.
Intrinsic Good: Something that is good for its own sake. For example, it might just be good to have pleasure, setting aside anything else it might get you.
Hedonism: The theory that states that the only thing which is intrinsically good is pleasure. So, everything is ultimately instrumentally good for pleasure.