The Requirement of Voluntary Act in Criminal Law and Attempts at Its Moral Justification

Document Type : Original Research

Author
H. Mahboobi Arani
Department of Philosophy & Logic, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
10.58209/jpt.1.1.1
Abstract
For a crime to be realized, the defendant is judged as a criminal with moral and legal liability, deserving to be punished properly; Anglo-American legal theory appeals to the Requirement of Voluntary Act (RVA), a necessary and comprehensive requisite. According to this requisite, the criminal act has consisted of Mens rea and Actus reus, with voluntary acts as the Actus reus in its restricted conception. Moral and legal philosophers have attempted to provide various moral explanations for the RVA, particularly utilizing theories of action philosophy. In this paper, I introduce the RVA as it is articulated in Anglo-American legal theory (in first two parts) and then illustrate and review five different possible moral rationales that could be deduced. Finally, I will conclude my paper with some hints about my preferable view and set forth questions concerning the very validity of such attempts at philosophically moral justification.
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