ABSTRACT
The preceding discussion has been largely concerned with the exploration of different models of criminal responsibility. The starting point has inevitably been the ‘classic’ individualist model, which takes the individual human actor as a natural unit of agency and candidate for any allocation of moral or legal responsibility. It has been seen how this classic model predominantly informs the content and process of contemporary Western criminal law. Criminal responsibility has therefore to a large extent followed the biological human being and thus also found its expression in the psychological and physical characteristics of the individual human actor. However, in a society increasingly characterised by the presence and impact of organisations and organisational structures, the dominant role of the classic individualist model may be validly questioned. Two possible lines of enquiry have emerged from the earlier theoretical and contextual discussion. The first of these considers the possibility that organisations may be regarded as possessing their own distinctive and autonomous identity, so that a convincing case may be made for saying that some organisations in some circumstances may be seen as autonomous agents and appropriate subjects for the allocation of responsibility in relation to certain activities and events. The second line of enquiry relates to the role of individuals within organisational structures and considers the identification of different forms of individual agency and responsibility within such a context. Here the principal outcome would be a distinction between more specific actions (or ‘predicate’ offending) carried out within an organisation and that kind of action which in a wider sense designs, promotes
and facilitates such predicate offences. The latter in effect combines a model of individual responsibility with one of organisational context, leading to a form of individual responsibility arising from involvement in an essentially collective enterprise. In one sense this third model may be located at a point between that of classic individual human responsibility and that of an autonomous organisational responsibility, since it combines elements of both the individual and the collective.
