Hart Publishing The Emotional Brain and the Guilty Mind: Novel Paradigms of Culpability and Punishment

This book applies insights on emotions, moral decision-making and behaviour that have emerged from behavioural and brain studies as an empirical premise to develop a holistic paradigm of culpabilitya paradigm that gives more prominence to emotion-related factors within its relevant psychological set. The book provides a broader paradigm of the 'legally relevant mind' in which emotions are afforded due prominence in defining the normative competences that are required to meet culpable states of mind. It offers normative arguments for incorporating emotional competences as part of the issue of culpability and emphasises that a notion of culpability that more strongly takes emotional competences into account is more able to capture the essence of blameworthiness and is in closer compliance with the principle of personal guilt as well as retributivist and rehabilitative approaches to punishment. The book tests the newly developed paradigm of culpability on specific culpability doctrinesnotably, mens rea, insanity, and diminished capacity. After interfacing these doctrines with the newly developed paradigm of culpability, the book reconsiders their conceptual substance and provides revised formulations of their standards. The book suggests that the implementation of the holistic paradigm of culpability supports the inclusion of extreme socio-environmental deprivation defense and concludes with an analysis of the potential implications of this general paradigm of culpability for forensic and correctional contexts.