Law, emotions, and "Reactive Defences"

Voluntarist accounts of culpability tend to focus on the concepts of choice and capacity as being paramount to the kind of rational agency for which application of the criminal law should be focused but exclude consideration of the factors that might bear on the authenticity of an agent’s choice. Novel paradigms of culpability hold that other aspects, such as socio-environmental considerations and emotions, should factor into culpability assessments. After exploring these alternative bases of culpability, this chapter considers the role of emotions in connecting the criminal law doctrines of duress, necessity, and self-defence, understood here as a sub-category of substantive criminal law defences known as “reactive defences”. By drawing out the normative features which these defences share, it is argued that a focus on the previously underappreciated emotive content of self-defence can help to answer difficult doctrinal questions relating to duress and necessity.