Searching for Criminal Responsibility

Abstract

Abstract In her latest book, In Search of Criminal Responsibility, Nicola Lacey distinguishes four ‘more or less discrete ideational frameworks for the understanding of criminal responsibility’, focusing respectively on capacity, on character, on outcomes, and on risk; she traces the rise and fall (and rise) of each of these conceptions, and the complicated and shifting relationships between them. These are, she thinks, ‘competing’, ‘philosophically inconsistent conceptions of responsibility’, although they can sometimes ‘coexist’ with each other in the historically messy and conflicted practices of criminal law. This chapter responds to Lacey’s claims about the changing conceptions of responsibility that she finds in English criminal law: not to deny those claims, but to argue that they need to be qualified in the light of a more complex conceptual schema than she provides. It discusses just what these changing ‘conceptions of responsibility’ are conceptions of, and just what it is that changes between them; and it argues that the final change, which Lacey describes as the development of a risk-based conception of responsibility and as marking a ‘resurgence of character-based mechanisms’, is best understood not as a change in the conception of responsibility, but rather as an abandonment of responsibility (answerability), in favour of kinds of liability that are detached from responsibility.