Mental disorders in the chilean criminal code: a study on culpability

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to enrich the understanding of culpability, specifically, conceptualizing mental disorders, examining their classes, and identifying the agential capacities that they affect and that are crucial to establishing that a person is culpable. Meeting this goal requires reinterpreting Article 10 Nº 1 of the chilean Criminal Code. I argue that this precept must be understood in a way that allows it to perform its proper function: excluding culpability where the subject does not possess the necessary capacities to act culpably. I will propose a key distinction between different types of mental disorders that will allow said precept to fulfil this critical function for a criminal law of culpability.