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14 - Guilt in Criminal Law: Guilt in Us or in the Stars?

from III - Legal Doctrine and Cognitive Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2021

By
Mikołaj Małecki  and
Marek Sławiński
Edited by
Bartosz Brożek ,
Jaap Hage  and
Nicole Vincent
Bartosz Brożek
Affiliation:
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Jaap Hage
Affiliation:
Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
Nicole Vincent
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
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Summary

This article explores the notion of guilt understood as one of the conditions required to attribute criminal liability to a perpetrator of a prohibited act. We narrow our considerations only to the theories developed by continental law scholars. As a guiding schema for our presentation, we take the famous quote from Shakespeare, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Our point of departure are the psychological theories that locate guilt in us, therefore explaining it as a perpetrator’s state of mind. With the critiques of this approach, we move to the normative theories which search for guilt outside the agent. Guilt is understood here as a charge that a perpetrator did not act in accordance with their legal obligations. Next, we present the imputative theory, which tries to return from distant stars to a perpetrator in defining what guilt is. In our final remarks, we offer the assessment of guilt as a principle of criminal liability and of its importance to the standard of human rights. Along the way, we also point to various problems that arise on the basis of each one of the discussed theories and that are interesting from the perspective of cognitive science, such as the problems of naïve psychology or the assumption of free will.

Type
Chapter
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Law and Mind
A Survey of Law and the Cognitive Sciences
 , pp. 289 - 316
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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