Insufficient Concern: A Unified Conception of Criminal Culpability

Most criminal law theorists and the criminal codes on which they comment posit four distinct forms of criminal culpability: purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence.' Negligence as a form of criminal culpability is somewhat controversial,2 but the other three are not. What controversy there is concerns how the lines between them should be drawn3 and whether there should be additional forms of criminal culpability besides these four.4 My purpose in this Essay is to make the case for fewer, not more, forms of criminal culpability. Indeed, I shall try to demonstrate that purpose and knowledge can be reduced to recklessness because, like recklessness, they exhibit the basic moral vice of insufficient concern for the interests of others. I shall also argue that additional forms of criminal culpability are either unnecessary, because they too can be subsumed within recklessness as insufficient concern, or undesirable, because they punish a character trait or disposition rather than an occurrent mental state.