For a crime to be realized, the defendant is judged as a criminal with moral and legal liability, deserving to be punished properly; Anglo-American legal theory appeals to the Requirement of Voluntary Act (RVA), a necessary and comprehensive requisite. According to this requisite, the criminal act has consisted of Mens rea and Actus reus, with voluntary acts as the Actus reus in its restricted conception. Moral and legal philosophers have attempted to provide various moral explanations for the RVA, particularly utilizing theories of action philosophy. In this paper, I introduce the RVA as it is articulated in Anglo-American legal theory (in first two parts) and then illustrate and review five different possible moral rationales that could be deduced. Finally, I will conclude my paper with some hints about my preferable view and set forth questions concerning the very validity of such attempts at philosophically moral justification.  

In the preface to his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant characterizes his own critical metaphysics as the main opponent of dogmatism, which inevitably results in the assertion of conflicting dogmas especially about the existence of God, the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. Simultaneously, Kant subtly distinguishes his critical philosophy from three other stances opposing dogmatism: the skepticism of Descartes and Hume, the empiricism of John Lock, and the indifferentism of thinkers who, without rejecting metaphysical assertions, refute any attempt to argue for them systematically and rigorously. Refusing indifferentism, Kant somehow admits a commonsensical view similar to that of indifferentism regarding principal issues of metaphysics. Touching very briefly on Kant’s view, the paper examines Nietzsche's take on especially the issue of the existence of the Christian God. Defending a kind of stance similar to skepticism or even, in some aspects, to indifferentism, Nietzsche’s chief endeavor is to look at the issue from the different perspectives of genealogical and axiological critiques in order to pave the way for an entire overlooking the issue. In this respect, such an endeavor results in a stance contrary to Kant’s commonsensical position, ending up in Nietzsche’s talk of the Death of God and the Death of the True World.