This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Suppose in the jungle I shoot a man thinking he was a threatening tiger.

Have I killed the man intentionally?

It's a sort of conundrum that keeps lawyers as well as philosophers happily preoccupied.

There appear to be a number of factors that need to be in place before someone is held criminally responsible for an action such as whether they know

what they're doing and whether they should know what they're doing. These in a way are

timeless considerations. They apply to a criminal action now or one a hundred years ago.

But Nicola Lacey argues that there's also an historical component to criminal responsibility that can't be ignored.

The concept of criminal responsibility makes sense only within the particular

institutional framework in which it operates.

Nicola Lacy, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you, Nigel. The topic we're going to focus on is criminal

responsibility. Could we just begin by saying roughly what criminal

responsibility is? I guess that we use the term criminal responsibility in lots of different ways

when we're talking about the criminal law. Sometimes we would mean it just if we

talk about someone being criminally responsible. We're simply referring to the

fact that they've been convicted. But actually

when lawyers talk about criminal responsibility, they are usually separating out just one of the

components that feeds into a justified criminal conviction and that is something to do with not just the person's conduct

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