Sometimes I love my job.

Here's an intuitive principle, one that liberals (in the classical sense) generally subscribe to. Don't restrict behavior unless it harms others. If it's purely self-regarding (i.e., if it affects only the person doing it) don't restrict. That behavior is offensive is not reason for restricting it - laws are only justified when performing something (or refraining from performing something) might harm some other person.

But consider the following series of examples by Joel Feinberg. They rock. I'll give you a sampling. You are supposed to imagine that you're ona bus, a public, city bus, that you must take in order to make an important appointment (say, a job interview). It's crowded, and all the seats are taken. The question is: should the behavior in question be restricted (i.e., should the law say, legitimately, that such behavior can't happen in a public arena with a captive audience, like a city bus). There are thirty-one examples, I'll give you the highlights:

1. A passenger who obviously hasn't bathed in more than a month sits down next to you. He reeks of a barely tolerable stench.
2. A passenger wearing a sirt of violently clashing orange and crimson sits down directly in your forward line of vision. You must keep your eyes down to avoid looking at him.
3. A passenger sits down next to you, pulls out a slate tablet from his brief case, and proceeds to scratch his fingernails loudly across the slate.

Fairly benign so far. Here we go.

6. A group of passengers enters the bus and shares a seating compartment with you. They spread a table cloth over their laps and proceed to eat a picnic lunch that consists of live insects, fish heads, and pickled sex organs of lamb, veal and pork, smothered in garlic and onions. Their table manners leave almost everything to be desired.
7. Things get worse and worse. The itinerant picknickers practice gluttony in the ancient Roman manner, gorging until satiation and then vomiting on their table cloth. Their practice, however, is a novel departure from the ancient custom in that they eat their own and one another's vomit along with the remaining food.
8. A coprophagic sequel to story 7.

Yow! It goes on:

10. A group of mourners carrying a coffin enter the bus and share a seating compartment with you. Although they are all dressed in black their demeanor is by no means funereal. In fact they seem more angry than sorrowful, and refer to the deceased as "the old bastard," and "the bloody corpse." At one point they rip open the coffin with hammers and proceed to smash the corpse's face with a series of hard hammer blows.

I'll start to abbreviate some of the stories. You get the idea.

13. Naked passenger.
14. Naked passenger masturbating.
17. A man and woman engage in acts of mutual masturbation. which climaxes in the act of coitus, somewhat acrobatically performed as required by the crowded circumstances.
23. A passenger with a dog takes an aisle seat at your side. He or she keeps the dog calm at first by petting it in a familiar and normal way, but then petting gives way to hugging, and gradually goes beyond the merely affectionate to the unmistakably erotic, culminating finally with oral contact with the canine genitals.

Whoa! Now, I always thought of my self as a liberal, but it seems to me that if someone starts to have sex with a dog on a bus, they should be required to leave the bus. Call me crazy. Apparently not everyone agreed with me today. There's more stuff, but some of it is tinged with offense to religious symbolism which not everyone is offended by.

Also, my paper "Global Justice and the Limits of Human Rights" just got accepted by The Philosophical Quarterly today. YEAH! The graduate advisor told me that if I get one more publication, I get a job. Boo-yeah! Of course, that's bullshit, but it makes me feel good anyway.