Guilt (culpa)

I do not take care of criminal law. However, for a litigator, some concepts from criminal law are very useful. One of the most important is culpableness. From prof. Waszczyński’s excellent manuscript I learned that that there are four forms of guilt (culpa) :
(a) culpa thinks with immediate intent – when I’m going to say I want to commit something wrong
(b) intentional culpa with possible intent – when I kind of do not want to commit anything wrong, but I anticipate that something bad by me can happen and I AGREE TO THIS
(c) inadvertent culpa called recklessness – when I anticipate THAT SOMETHING BAD CAN HAPPEN BY ME, BUT I UNJUSTIFIABLY SUPPOSE THAT I WILL AVOID IT and
(d) inadvertent culpa called negligence – when I do not even anticipate that something bad can happen by me, but I SHOULD AND COULD HAVE FORESEEN IT.

Each form of guilt has many nuances and questions about how to understand them in detail and how to decide in practice what kind of fault it is. For me, however, the most fascinating was the so-called GENERAL GUILT THEORY, which tries to answer the question: what is the common denominator of all forms of guilt: is there one common definition of guilt for all these characters. This proved impossible. I do not remember the details of these theories, apart from the names Makarewicz and Makowski and Windebland.