Sympathy and Antipathy: Essays Legal and Philosophical

The search for a moral standard of right and wrong which is external to any particular evaluator, and so escapes subjectivity, has a long history. Jeremy Bentham, in trying to find such a standard, opted for utilitarianism, which at least provides an inter-subjective standard of right and wrong. Everything else, thought Bentham, however dressed up, collapses into the purely subjective principle of sympathy and antipathy - "I like it" or "I don't like it". The essays in this book seek to show this principle of sympathy and antipathy continues to be alive and well in legal philosophy. This is the central theme of the book and the author uses it throughout to illuminate a host of questions ranging from the worth of constitutional rights to the merits of scepticism to the acceptability of spanking.