Responsibility, Authority, and the Community of Moral Agents in Domestic and International Criminal Law

Antony Duff argues that the criminal law’s characteristic function is to hold people responsible. It only has the authority to do this when the person who is called to account, and those who call her to account, share some prior relationship. In systems of domestic criminal law, this relationship is co-citizenship. The polity is the relevant community. In international criminal law, the relevant community is simply the moral community of humanity. I am sympathetic to his community-based analysis, but argue that the moral community must play a greater role in the domestic case and that the collection of individual political communities must play a greater role in the international case

Criminal law · International community · Moral authority · Moral reasoning · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · International Law and Human Rights · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · War, Ethics, and Justification