Culpability: its Nature and Role in Punishable Blameworthiness

Abstract The article explores culpability as the moral property that along with wrongdoing determines an actor’s responsibility for some bad state of affairs. Two main theories of culpability are distinguished, the voluntarist and the quality of will theories; both are mapped onto a schematic of the psychology of rational action in order to show the natural properties onto which the moral property of culpability supervenes; and three reasons are given to prefer the voluntarist theory of culpability.