2 - The Significance of Criminal Responsibility

Summary

This chapter offers a rethinking of criminal responsibilty. What makes criminal responsibility significant, I argue, is that it organises key sets of relations as relations of responsibility. These sets of relations are those between self, others and the state. It is this hitherto overlooked aspect that demands a new account of its significance. This chapter has two main parts. In the first part, I assess existing criminal responsibility scholarship. In the second part of the chapter, I develop my new account of the role of criminal responsibility, focusing on each of the nodes of my tripartite schema of relations of responsibility. Each node of my schema is closely connected to the others, but, as I discuss below, at different points in this book, I foreground either self, others or the state in my analysis.