Criminal Sociology

Answers

• Q06AUTOMATON

  Can people be morally responsible for actions that follow necessarily from their bodily constitution and circumstances?

  No. moral responsibility; only social responsibility. Positivist psychology refutes free will, so punishment cannot rest on moral guilt; a person is held responsible only because he lives in society, and penalties are social defense.

  It is only too evident that man is materially responsible for his acts by the mere fact that he lives in society, because, when a man does an act, only another man can call him to ac- count for it, either as an individual or as the representative of society as a whole. A man who does not live in society but alone in a desert place is not even materially accountable for his own acts, for the very obvious reason that there is no other man to call him to account. But man is also responsible legally for his acts from the mere fact that he lives in society, since, as has already been said, law is conceivable and possible only in so- ciety. The fact of living with other men is the sole source of man's rights and hence, also, of his duties. By the mere fact of no longer living in society he no longer has either rights or duties. It cannot be said that man, inasmuch as he is man, "virtually" carries in himself, in his own person, his duties and his rights, for to say that a thing exists only virtually or in idea amounts to saying that it does not exist. Whatever exists, exists in act and in fact and the ideal possibility of its existing is not enough to give it a real existence. Man absolutely alone has really neither rights nor duties for the reason that rights as well as duties, in the legal and social sense (I am not here concerned with religious duties), are a relation of man to man.

  Part III, 'Positive Theory of Penal Responsibility', ch. I 'The Negation of the Free Will' and ch. IV · Downloaded archive.org 1917 translation; table of contents shows Part III ch. I 'The Negation of the Free Will' and ch. IV 'Man is responsible for his acts, because he lives in society'. Editorial preface dates first Italian edition to 1884.