Juzaszek Maciej, Philosophical Analysis of Two Types of Legal Responsibility

The goal of my article is to analyse the concept of legal responsibility from the perspective of an analogous analysis of the nature of moral responsibility. In my considerations, I draw upon the Anglo-American metaethical discussions of moral responsibility, especially prominent in philosophy after Peter F. Strawson’s landmark paper Freedom and Resentment. I argue that legal responsibility has a very similar structure to moral responsibility. In particular, we can also distinguish two types of such responsibility (which do not need to coexist), both of which play an important role in the process of justifying legal reactions to blameworthy actions. Despite an intuitive understanding of these two types of responsibility, lawyers rarely reflect on their nature and sometimes fail to distinguish them adequately. This paper aims to expand our knowledge and understanding of legal responsibility and to contribute to further research on the notion of responsibility at the intersection of...