This chapter defends three ideas. (1) That negligence is essentially a conative failure to exercise due care. The negligent agent doesn’t care enough about a relevant moral aim. (2) Resultantly, the potential cognitive failures of agents, whether they foresee or fail to foresee certain risks of harm, are only incidentally relevant to their negligence. In this way, (3) negligence is conceptually contiguous with recklessness. The hallmark of both reckless and negligence conduct is an insufficient regard for the legitimate interests of others, and what separates them is better understood in terms of conative differences in how each agent disregards those interests, rather than cognitive differences in advertence. I examine these claims in the context of a puzzle regarding negligence and foresight, and consider the implications of my conclusions for negligence culpability in morality and the traditional hierarchy of mens rea in the law.

This chapter takes up the story of the development of criminal responsibility in Australian criminal laws in the last decades of the twentieth century. At this point, a number of currents running through the century – including modernisation, codification and the coherence of Australian criminal laws – which are discussed in preceding chapters of this book, come together. This period represents the high-water mark of faith in the value and feasibility of organising criminal law around criminal responsibility, as legal and other changes occurring on the national and international levels were met with an attempt to fix criminal responsibility principles at the heart of Australian criminal law. As I show in this chapter, in this period, criminal responsibility became key to the self-definition of the criminal law, and the language of criminal responsibility became the language of the criminal law.