This is the first of four chapters extending the ideas of reasonableness and risk to problems of the criminal law. The criminal law is the area in which the interest in responsibility is perhaps most pressing. Various proxies for the tort system may be the best way of imperfectly realizing corrective justice; proxies for the criminal law are cause for concern about miscarriages of justice. Those who cause injuries ought to pay, but if someone else offers a voluntary payment instead, the injured party has no grounds for complaint. Since the injury is the injurer's problem, how can the injured party complain if someone makes what is in effect a gift to the injurer? In the case of crimes, however, there is a strong and legitimate retributive sentiment, which demands that wrongdoers “pay” for their deeds, though in a different sense. I think the basic apparatus introduced in our discussion of tort helps to make sense of this retributive impulse, and goes some distance toward justifying it.

An account of responsibility in the criminal law must do at least four things. First, it must identify the type of acts that generate criminal culpability, and explain the grounds for criminalizing certain types of behavior. Second, it must explain the general requirement of a guilty mind for criminal culpability. Tort law's negligence standard measures conduct, apart from any questions about the defendant's thoughts; criminal culpability requires more.