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Criminal Responsibility. By Victor Tadros [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xv, 373 and (Index) 16 pp. Hardback £50.00. ISBN 0-19-926159-8.]

IN RECENT YEARS, Anglo-American criminal theory has enjoyed a resurgence of interest, with a plethora of articles appearing in general and specialist journals. There have, however, been relatively few monographs. Victor Tadros has gone some way toward redressing that imbalance. In Criminal Responsibility, he outlines a philosophically rich account of the conditions under which someone might legitimately be held liable for committing a (serious) crime, before bringing that account to bear on a variety of doctrines from the general part of the criminal law. In Tadros’s view, because the criminal law involves moral condemnation, the key to a defendant’s (‘‘D’s’’) criminal responsibility for an action is, in turn, her moral responsibility; and the key question for moral responsibility is whether D’s action reflects on D qua agent. It does so, according to Tadros, when the action is reflective of D’s character. Typically, such an action is motivated by desires that D herself endorses. But it need not be, because character is also a matter of having a system of values lying behind those desires. In a wrinkle on Gary Watson’s account, D’s action is to be regarded as being ‘‘in character’’ even if it proceeds from desires that conflict with D’s values, provided that D herself accepts the inconsistency. Moreover, the values and desires with which D’s character is identified are those that persist over time. Agents persist over time, and so do their values: Tadros welds these propositions into a distinctive character theory of responsibility, one that meets many of the standard objections to such theories. Along the way, he makes a number of insightful observations, including helpful analyses of the difference between the negligence-based culpability in Misra [2004] EWCA Crim. 2375 and Adomako [1995] 1 A.C. 171 and of the importance of motive to character and blame. In order to know whether D is responsible for an action, we need to know why she did it, and whether the motive was truly hers. There is much to be said for character theories of responsibility. Choicebased accounts have the fatal weakness that they cannot explain negligence, while capacity theories, being negative rather then positive accounts, can only ever state preconditions of responsibility. By distinguishing between desires and values, and expanding the timeframe, Tadros offers new tools with which to analyse those out-of-character actions for which D may not be responsible. At the same time, the account is somewhat sketched rather than fully defended. Tadros does not consider how his theory might inform the operation of the criminal law—especially, how it might do so without encountering the kinds of problems complained of by Kelman. The criminal law tends to start with action and events, and to work with snapshots of their agents rather than histories. For a variety of reasons, at least some of which are institutional, the law takes D’s character as a given and not as something to investigate. Perhaps it is wrong to do so, but Tadros needs to do more to show us why.