On Wed Feb 5, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online), Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov (Surrey) – SCLP Fellow and Professor of Neuroscience, Law, and Legal Philosophy (and Head of Social Sciences) – will give a seminar on omissions in action theory and criminal law theory. Click HERE to join the session online – no pre-reading required.

Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov – “The Constitution of Action and Responsibility for ‘Omissions’”

A criminal sanction is typically imposed on the defendant for something he has done; for some clearly identified criminal act.  Usually, there is no liability for failing to act.  The criminal law does, however, on occasion, hold defendants accountable for one kind of failing to act; for ‘omissions’.  The question follows; how might we be responsible when we have not acted – when the thing we are to be responsible for is apparently a nothing rather than a something?  The central claim of this paper is that law’s ‘omissions’ are straightforwardly actions too.  Notably, two matters should not mislead: first, the absence of physical movement should not encourage us to think that action is absent; and second the failure to do some particular thing should not be taken to entail the absence of any normatively relevant action.  When we ask what someone is responsible for in cases of ‘omissions’, there will always be some action that provides the solution; people are responsible for what they do in the usual way, and not for some absence of doing.  An understanding of the breadth of capacities exercised in particular actions, that together constitute those actions as such, provides the route to grounding this claim.