The second volume in Joel Feinberg's series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Offense to Others focuses on the "offense principle," which maintains that preventing shock, disgust, or revulsion is always a morally relevant reason for legal prohibitions. Feinberg clarifies the concept of an "offended mental state" and further contrasts the concept of offense with harm. He also considers the law of nuisance as a model for statutes creating "morals offenses," showing its inadequacy as a model for understanding "profound offenses," and discusses such issues as obscene words and social policy, pornography and the Constitution, and the differences between minor and profound offenses.

The second volume in the series The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, this book explicates the "offense principle," clarifies the concept of the "offended mental state," examines pornography and the Constitution, obscenity, and obscene words and social policy.

These four volumes address the question of the kinds of conduct may the state make criminal without infringing on the moral autonomy of individual citizens.

The final volume of Feinberg's four-volume work, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law examines the philosophical basis for the criminalization of so-called "victimless crimes" such as ticket scalping, blackmail, consented-to exploitation of others, commercial fortune telling, and consensual sexual relations.

The 4th and final volume in the series defines the philosophical basis for criminalizing so-called 'victimless crimes', such as pornography and consensual sexual activity.

This book focuses on the 'harm principle', the common-sense view that prevention of harm to persons other than the perpetrator is a legitimate purpose of criminal legislation.

N this volume, Feinberg focuses on the meanings of "interest," the relationship between interests and wants, and the distinction between want-regarding and ideal-regarding analyses on interest and hard cases for the applications of the concept of harm. Examples of the "hard cases" are harm to character, vicarious harm, and prenatal and posthumous harm. Feinberg also discusses the relationship between harm and rights, the concept of a victim, and the distinctions of various quantitative dimensions of harm, consent, and offense, including the magnitude, probability, risk, and "importance" of harm.