Concept
Guilt (law)
Overview
In criminal law, guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. Legal guilt is entirely externally defined by the state, or more generally a "court of law". Being factually guilty of a criminal offense means that one has committed a violation of criminal law or performed all the elements of the offense set out by a criminal statute. The determination that one has committed that violation is made by an external body (a "court of law") after the determination of the facts by a finder of fact or "factfinder" (i.e., a jury) and is, therefore, as definitive as the record-keeping of the body. For instance, in the case of a bench trial, a judge acts as both the court of law and the factfinder, whereas in a jury trial, the jury is the trier of fact and the judge acts only as the trier of law.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Guilt (law) is discussed.
We ought some day to be able at last to understand these things; as yet we cannot. Here perhaps is the place to remark that at bottom the sense of guilt is nothing but a topographical variety of anxiety, and that in its later phases it coincides completely with the dread of the super-ego.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
It is essentially in hysteria and in states of a hysterical type that this condition is found. The mechanism by which the sense of guilt is kept unconscious is easy to discover. The hysterical type of ego defends itself from the painful perception which the criticisms of its super-ego threaten to produce in it by the same means that it uses to defend itself from an unendurable…
Sigmund Freud, The ego and the id
names the idea; states what it is
Virtue is here depressed from the obscurity in which it is involved. Guilt is matured from the difficulty of its detection; licentiousness is rewarded by the immediate enjoyment which it promises. If any person will walk through St.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
_Guilt._—Although the most intelligent judges of the witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt, nevertheless, was not there. So it is with all guilt. _Misunderstood Sufferers._—Great natures suffer otherwise than their worshippers imagine; they suffer most severely from the ignoble, petty emotions of certain evil moments; in short, from doubt of their own…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
names the idea; opens on it
16. The same is to be said of a family or a race; and, moreover, the punishment for inherited guilt may often have a curative, or even a preventive efficacy, so that children or posterity may refrain from guilt because the ancestral penalty falls upon them before they become guilty. 17. The immortality of the soul asserted, on the ground that God would not have deemed a race doomed to perish after a brief earthly…
Plutarch, Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice
names the idea; opens on it
Related ideas
- Athens
- Punishment
- Restorative justice
- Socrates
- Statute
- State (polity)
- Free will
- Catholic Church
- Münchhausen trilemma
- Code of law
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Face-to-face (philosophy).