Automatism, insanity, and the psychology of criminal responsibility: a philosophical inquiry

This is a book about the role that psychological impairment should play in a theory of criminal liability. Criminal guilt in the Anglo-American legal tradition requires both that the defendant committed some proscribed act and did sowith intent, knowledge, or recklessness. The second requirement corresponds to the intuitive idea that people should not be punished for something they didnot do ‘on purpose’ or if they ‘did not realize what they were doing’. Unlikemany works in this area, this book addresses the automatism and insanity defences by examining the types of functional impairment that typical candidates for these defences actually suffer. What emerges is a much wider conceptual framework that allows us to understand the significance of psychological states and processes for the attribution of criminal responsibility in a manner that is logically coherent, morally defensible, and consistent with research in psychopathology. INDICE: Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Introduction; 2. Problematic defenses: insanity; 3. Problematic defenses: automatism; 4. Actions, reasoning, and offenses; 5. Automatism 6. The insanity defense; 7. Moral foundations; Index.

• ISBN: 978-0-521-06133-9
• Editorial: Cambridge University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 292
• Fecha Publicación: 24/04/2008
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés