Speaker: Dr. iur. Dr. phil. Philipp-Alexander Hirsch (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime)

Commentator: Levin Güver, PhD student, UCL Laws

About the lecture

This paper examines how criminal law assesses the reasons behind an offender's decision to act in violation of legal prohibitions. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional perspective that includes both German and common law traditions, it argues that mens rea (or Vorsatz) plays a crucial role in defining the wrongness of criminal actions, since criminal wrongdoing inherently involves a wrongful intentionality on the part of the offender. This wrongful intentionality is shaped by the relationship between the offender's motivating reasons and the normative reasons established by legal prohibitions. Rather than employing a simplistic binary approach that merely determines whether an offender’s actions align with or violate legal norms, this paper—drawing on Raz—demonstrates that different forms of mens rea or Vorsatz reflect qualitatively distinct ways in which offenders relate to what the law prohibits. Revisiting Antony Duff's distinction between "attacks" and "endangerments," the paper provides a new explanation of why these different forms of intentionality are significant at the level of wrongdoing, arguing that, due to the nomological structure of criminal law, intention (including oblique intention) and recklessness represent fundamentally different kinds of wrongdoing, rather than merely different degrees of culpability.

About the speaker:

Philipp-Alexander Hirsch is a legal scholar and philosopher. He has led an independent research group on criminal-law theory at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg since 2022. His research focuses on criminal law and criminal procedure, legal philosophy and legal theory, and the history and philosophy of criminal law in the Age of Enlightenment.

Picture by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels

Assessing mens rea: How Criminal Law Disapproves of Our Reasons for Action