Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Equality, Luck, and Responsibility
- 2 Corrective Justice and Spontaneous Order
- 3 A Fair Division of Risks
- 4 Foresight and Responsibility
- 5 Punishment and the Tort/Crime Distinction
- 6 Mistakes
- 7 Recklessness and Attempts
- 8 Beyond Corrective and Retributive Justice? Marx and Pashukanis on the “Narrow Horizons of Bourgeois Right”
- 9 Reciprocity and Responsibility in Distributive Justice
- Index
7 - Recklessness and Attempts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Equality, Luck, and Responsibility
- 2 Corrective Justice and Spontaneous Order
- 3 A Fair Division of Risks
- 4 Foresight and Responsibility
- 5 Punishment and the Tort/Crime Distinction
- 6 Mistakes
- 7 Recklessness and Attempts
- 8 Beyond Corrective and Retributive Justice? Marx and Pashukanis on the “Narrow Horizons of Bourgeois Right”
- 9 Reciprocity and Responsibility in Distributive Justice
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, I explore two further respects in which chance plays an important role in the criminal law. The first of these concerns recklessness: Those who recklessly expose others to the risk of serious injury commit serious crimes if those risks ripen, but are at most guilty of other, usually distinct, crimes if they do not. The second concerns the role of chance in the modern law of attempts: Attempted crimes are punished much less severely than completed ones. The second issue has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, because, according to a prominent view, successful and failed attempts differ only through the arbitrary role of chance. Attempts will be the main focus of the chapter, but in the midst of discussing them, I will turn to recklessness, for one of the key issues in the law of attempts is the requirement of intention for attempt liability, even if the corresponding completed crime can be committed recklessly. The relation between attempts and recklessness is also brought out by another feature of the law of attempts, namely, the boundary between mere preparation and attempt. Once these issues are clarified, the rationale for the decreased punishment given to failed attempts becomes clear. Attempts merit less severe punishment because they rest on a different basis of criminality than do completed crimes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Equality, Responsibility, and the Law , pp. 218 - 245Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998