Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, I will suggest, (...) a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)

Corporate behaviour is often regulated through the criminal law by means of reverse onus offences. Such offences are alleged to involve violations of the Presumption of Innocence. Such allegations almost always assume natural persons as defendants. The arguments supporting reverse onus offences are typically instrumental, to do with the importance of the social goals promoted and the ease of proof. The Presumption of Innocence is taken to be an autonomy right of natural persons and so not subject to being sidelined (...) for reasons of law enforcement expediency. Corporations, however, are not natural persons: they have no autonomy right not to be treated as means. It may well be, then, that reverse onus offences are justified in the case of corporate defendants. I argue that the Presumption is not violated by such offences in the case of corporate defendants. I develop a broad concept of the criminal justice system as an allocative system, and argue that reverse onus offences properly allocate the burden of proof for corporations. Specifically, I argue that the normative demand for legal innocence is sufficiently met by the availability of a due diligence defence; that the responsibility of corporations when prohibited harms occur is properly a form of outcome-responsibility; and that taking into account issues of reciprocity, legitimacy and power reverse onus offences justly allocate the burden of proof in the case of corporate defendants. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 2 Seiten: 258-272.

This paper puts the famous story of Jekyll and Hyde to work for a specific analytic purpose. The question of responsibility for crime, complicated by the divided subjectivity implicit in Mr. Hyde’s appearance, and illuminated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grasp of contemporary psychiatric, evolutionary and medical thought as promising new technologies for effecting a distinction between criminality and innocence, is key to the interest of the story. I argue that Jekyll and Hyde serves as a powerful metaphor both for specifically (...) late Victorian perplexities about criminality and criminal responsibility, and for more persistently troubling questions about the legitimacy of and practical basis for criminalization. A close reading of the story illustrates the complex mix of elements bearing on criminal responsibility-attribution, and—incidentally—helps to explain what is wrong with the influential argument that, by the end of the nineteenth Century, attributions of responsibility in English criminal law already rested primarily and unambiguously on factual findings about the defendant’s state of mind. Far from representing the triumph of a practice of responsibility-attribution grounded in the assessment of whether the defendant’s capacities were fully engaged, I argue that the terrain of mental derangement defences in late nineteenth Century England helps us to understand that longer-standing patterns of moral evaluation of character remained central to the criminal process. And precisely because ‘character’ remained key to the institutional effort to distinguish criminality and innocence, the ‘terror’ of Stevenson’s story resides in its questioning of whether either scientific knowledge or moral evaluation of character can provide a stable basis for attributions of responsibility. In conclusion, I will also suggest that Stevenson’s tale can help us to make sense of the resurgence of overtly ‘character-based’ practices of responsibility attribution in contemporary Britain and the United States, which themselves reflect a renewed crisis of confidence in our ability to effect a ‘dissociation’ between criminality and innocence. (shrink)