The role of intention in criminal law stands in stark contrast to that of motive. While intention’s significance for criminal liability is hardly ever contested, motive’s relevance is most frequently relegated to the peripheries. This is, I believe, a mistake, and I hope to amend it by providing a novel argument in favour of motive’s relevance to criminal liability: an argument premised not on normative considerations, but on the very nature of motive itself. An agent’s motives, I will argue, are her ‘focal desires’. Desires, as I will illustrate in turn, are psychological dispositions that manifest in goal-directed behavior aimed at satisfying the object of the desire, and an agent’s focal desires are those desires whose satisfaction denotes the completion of the action-process the agent aims to undertake. The paper will conclude with a brief outlook as to the implications of these findings to criminal law.
The role of intention in criminal law stands in stark contrast to that of motive. While intention’s significance for criminal liability is hardly ever contested, motive’s relevance is most frequently relegated to the peripheries. Norrie, for instance, considers the irrelevance of motive “as firmly established in legal doctrine as any rule could be” (Norrie 2014: 42). This claim is echoed by Hall, for whom “hardly any part of penal law” is “more definitely settled than that motive is irrelevant” (Hall, 1960: 88). Although motive can be relevant to sentencing, the argument goes, it cannot factor in at the stage of criminal liability. In Williams’s words, “a crime may be committed from the best of motives and yet remain a crime” (Williams 1961: 31). I will henceforth refer to…
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