Emotions and the Veil of Voluntarism: The Loss of Judgment in Canadian Criminal Defences

In this perspective piece, the author attacks the notion of moral involuntariness in the Supreme Court of Canada\u27s judgment in R. v. Ruzic. He asserts that the voluntarist account of criminal liability is purely descriptive. Through the embrace of a mechanistic understanding of human agency, it forestalls judgment and veils the normative foundation of criminal law. The author asserts the need for a more normative approach, one which seeks to evaluate the moral blameworthiness of an act. In the case of duress, the author suggests that it is not enough to simply state that a person\u27s will is constrained because he or she is acting under the influence of emotion. An evaluative account of emotions would suggest that emotions involve thought on the part of the actor, and that emotions can be mistaken. Therefore, the moral bases of emotions can and should be evaluated. The law could have considerable conservative inertia under a legal regime which allowed certain attitudes to go unexamined. For instance, the sources of a particular emotional reaction might be rooted in a subordinating, retrograde vision of society that placed a low value on certain classes of persons. Hence, the voluntarist account may allow morally suspect social norms and their regressive effects to persist in the criminal law. Through these and other lines of inquiry, the author leads us to question some of the underpinnings of criminal law thinking, and calls for the reintroduction of meaningful and open judgment into the law of criminal defences