ABSTRACT
It is characteristic of our own and all advanced legal systems that the individual's liability to punishment, at any rate for serious crimes carrying severe penalties, is made by law to depend on, among other things, certain mental conditions. These conditions can best be expressed in negative form as excusing conditions: the individual is not liable to punishment if at the time of his doing what would otherwise be a punishable act he is, say, unconscious, mistaken about the physical consequences of his bodily movements or the nature or qualities of the thing or persons affected by them, or, in some cases, if he is subjected to threats or other gross forms of coercion or is the victim of certain types of mental disease. This is a list, not meant to be complete, giving broad descriptions of the principal excusing conditions; the exact definition of these and their precise character and scope must be sought in the detailed exposition of our criminal law. If an individual breaks the law when none of the excusing conditions are present, he is ordinarily said to have acted of "his own free will," "of his own accord," "voluntarily"; or it might be said, "He could have helped doing what he did." If the determinist 1 has anything to say on this subject, it must be because he makes two claims. The first claim is that it may be true—though we cannot at present and may never be able to show that it is true—that human conduct (including in that expression not only actions involving the movements of the human body but its psychological elements or components such as decisions, choices, experiences of desire, effort, etc.) are subject to certain types of law, where law is to be understood in the sense of a scientific law. The second claim is that, if human conduct so understood is in fact subject to such laws (though at the present time we do not know it to be so), the distinction we draw between one who acts under excusing conditions and one who acts when none are present becomes unimportant, if not absurd. Consequently, to allow punishment to depend on the presence or absence of excusing conditions, or to think it justified when they are absent but not when they are present, is absurd, meaningless, irrational, or unjust, or immoral, or perhaps all of these.
