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- Title
Fitting the Model Penal Code into a Reasons-Responsiveness Picture of Culpability.
- Authors
ANTILL, GREGORY
- Abstract
This Note compares the Purpose, Knowledge, Recklessness, and Negligence (PKRN) mens rea regime laid out in the Model Penal Code (MPC) and dominant in American criminal law with the "reasons-responsiveness" conception of culpability widespread among contemporary philosophers and criminal-law theorists. Whereas a PKRN picture of culpability sorts an agent's culpability for an action according to whether the action was performed purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently, the reasons-responsiveness picture locates an agent's culpability in the responsiveness of the agent's reasoning capacities, which their actions evince. While many criminal-law theorists are cognizant of these different conceptions of culpability, most have assumed that the two pictures of culpability generally converge when it comes to the relative culpability judgments of actions performed purposefully, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently, so that even for those who reject an underlying PKRN conception of culpability in favor of an alternative reasons-responsiveness conception, a PKRN mens rea regime can still provide a roughly adequate system of culpability proxies. In contrast, this Note argues that criminal-law theory has deeply underestimated the degree to which these conceptions are in tension with one another. If the reasons-responsiveness picture of culpability is correct, we should expect frequent cases of interhierarchical disagreement between the reasons-responsiveness picture and the MPC grading regime. That is, we should expect frequent cases where, for example, an agent who acts purposefully is less culpable than an agent who performs that same action recklessly or negligently. This result has both important normative and empirical consequences for the practice and study of substantive criminal law. In particular, this Note argues that if the reasons-responsiveness account of culpability is correct, then the MPC's grading system will often fail to track offenders' relative culpability and result in predictably disproportionate punishments not merely within but also across grades of crimes.
- Subjects
CRIMINAL law; PUNISHMENT; AMERICAN Law Institute. Model penal code; CLASS actions; REASON
- Publication
Yale Law Journal, 2022, Vol 131, Issue 4, p1346
- ISSN
0044-0094
- Publication type
Article