Responsibility in Law and Morality

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Lawyers who write about responsibility tend to focus on criminal law at the expense of civil and public law; while philosophers tend to treat responsibility as a moral concept, and either ignore the law or consider legal responsibility to be a more or less distorted reflection of its moral counterpart. This book aims to counteract both of these biases. By adopting a comparative institutional approach to the relationship between law and morality, it challenges the common view that morality stands to law as critical standard to conventional practice. It shows how law and morality interact symbiotically, and how careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally. At the heart of this book lie two questions: what does it mean to say we are responsible And, what are our responsibilities Its aim is not to answer these questions but to challenge some traditional approaches to answering them and more importantly, to suggest fruitful alternative approaches that take law seriously.

Reviews

"Cane's lucidly-written and well-argued book is one of the finest ever contributions to responsibility theory, ranking qualitatively with Joel Feinberg's Doing and Deserving (Princeton, 1970) and H.L.A. Hart's Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford, 1968). It is absolutely required reading for anyone interested in developing a more comprehensive theory of responsibility." - J. Angelo Corlett (Mind)

Author Bio

For 20 years, Peter Cane taught law at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Since 1997 he has been a Professor of Law in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.