Volume 1

Criminal responsibility / by Charles Mercier.

  • Charles Arthur Mercier
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Criminal responsibility / by Charles Mercier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    means justly responsible, liable to punishment by the law which ought to be in force, but if this is his meaning, he confounds 44 is ” and 44 ought to be,” which is the pitfall into which nearly every critic of the law who is not a lawyer is sure to fall/ This pitfall I shall try to avoid, but I do not think its avoidance need compel me to confine myself exclusively to the legal sense of the term responsibility. Admitting that this sense of the term is strictly defined in the quoted words of Sir Fitzjames Stephen, the admission at once places that sense outside the purview of the present inquiry. Responsibility then becomes a strictly legal question, and one with which no one but a lawyer is competent to deal. The sense which I attach, through¬ out the following discussion, to the term ‘responsible' is 4 Rightly liable to punishment,’ and responsibility becomes the quality of being rightly liable to punishment. To clarify the concept, it is necessary to explain what is meant by 4 rightly,’ and what is meant by 4 punishment. When I speak of a person or an act as being rightly liable to punishment, I exclude from consideration all reference to law. I discard 4 is,’ and consider 4 ought to be ’ alone. This attitude is, it must be admitted, of con¬ siderable temerity. The law, the accumulated wisdom, the concentrated common sense, of many generations, sets up one standard of responsibility, and who am 1, that I should set up another ? The question would be crushing were it not that law is eminently modifiable; that it is continually being altered to bring it into accor¬ dance with the altering moods of the populace subject to its ministrations ; and that in this matter I speak, not as an isolated individual, but as in some sort representing, or at any rate according with, the body of opinion, as to what is right and wnat is wrong, which is now prevalent
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