Culpability

In criminal law, culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his conduct". Culpability therefore marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible, and a randomly occurring event, like naturally occurring earthquakes or naturally arriving meteorites, for which no human can be held responsible. Culpability descends from the Latin concept of fault (culpa). The concept of culpability is intimately tied up with notions of agency, freedom, and free will. All are commonly held to be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for culpability. From a legal perspective, culpability describes the degree of one's blameworthiness in the commission of a crime or offense. Except for strict liability crimes, the type and severity of punishment often follow the degree of culpability. "Culpability means, first and foremost, direct involvement in the wrongdoing, such as through participation or instruction", as compared with responsibility merely arising from "failure to supervise or to maintain adequate controls or ethical culture". Modern criminal codes in the United States usually make distinct four degrees of culpability. Legal definitions of culpability, verbatim from the Pennsylvania Crimes Code, are: A person acts purposely (criminally) with respect to a material element of an offense when: if the element involves the nature of his conduct or a result thereof, it is his conscious object to engage in conduct of that nature or to cause such a result; and if the element involves the attendant circumstances, he is aware of the existence of such circumstances or he believes or hopes that they exist.