Basic Problems Of Sin

Just as other human activities, crimes are also conducts for the human to change the world and meet their needs, so study on crimes should be based on the basic principles for general human activities.From the Marxist corpus theories, the author holds that crimes are not only pure objective existence, they are conducts combining the objectivity and dynamism, the objectivity just represents the outer forms of crimes, the value constitutes their nature. So the objectivity of crimes should be understood mainly from their valuable meanings, from their sense to the behaviors.Human activities are also controlled by some certain state of mind for criminals who conduct any crimes; the state of mind is defined as the mens rea, which connects the criminals and their crimes. The crimes are the external forms of the mens rea, it is just the mens rea which makes crimes belong to the criminals and become valuable, it is just the mens rea which makes the crimes anti-social and prohibited by the States, it is also just the mens rea which makes the crimes different from natural events. We can explain the natural events by mastering the causality, but for the crimes, we can only understand them, because the nature of crimes lies not on their objectivity, but on their meanings to the conductors and the society. So it is just the basic work to find out the causalities for understand crimes, relatively, the criminal law should focus more on value of crimes, that is to say, it is the key job to understand the mens rea of crimes.As the psychological process which promotes the criminals to choose and implementing crimes, the mens rea contains not only the conductors' attitudes towards the objective harmful conducts themselves and their consequences, but also their attitudes towards the law and the social order. So, mens rea is not only a structure of pure objective facts, but also a structure of value. The same as the general psychological process of human activities, mens rea includes three factors: cognition, emotion and will. Both cognition and will can be embodied as an entity, relatively, emotion takes its form as subjective spiritual experience with no stability form, the function of emotion can not be exist independently, so cognition and will consists of the two main factors of mens rea. As an objective entity, cognition and will contains the conductors' cognition and will towards the objective harmful conducts themselves and their consequences respectively, as a valuable entity, cognition and will contains the conductors' cognition and will towards law and social order respectively. The cognition factor includes that the conductors have recognized they are in some states of scarcity, what kind of methods can be taken to change the status, and they have also recognized that the methods are forbidden by the law. The emotion means that the conductors feel unsatisfied with their status. The will factor means that although the conductors can take action to change their state, to meet their needs within the framework of the law, while they will choose and implement the actions prohibited by law. The mission of human beings is not only to understand the world, but also to change the world to meet his needs. The cognition and emotion are factors belong to the area of understanding the world, while the will belongs to changing the world., it is not merely a conceptive process, it always embody itself by forms of actions. Human activities without will can not be called action; they are mere behavior with no legal significance. In some sense, we can say that the state of mind is the soul of human activities, mens rea is the soul of crimes, and the will is the soul of mens rea.The will of mens rea includes the conductors' will towards the harmful behaviors and the law, the former embodied the later, the later makes the former meaningful. The nature of a crime depends on the conductor's will. Crimes are anti-social actions, are struggles between individual person and the government are actions despising the social order, so penalty is only the self-defense means for the social and the state to tackle the actions which damage her living conditions. No matter society , social order or the state, they can only exist by law, law order, when we say that crimes are anti-social actions, are actions despising the social order, despising the state, we mean the actions embody the conductors' will not obey the law ,will not take actions within the law order. So the will of mens rea represents the nature of a crime.Mens rea and the degree of its realizing plays the decisive role in distinguishing conducts in criminal law, it not only determines a conduct criminal or innocent, determines the boundaries of crimes, determines the shape of a crime, but also decisive in applying the penalty. So, mens rea constitutes a basic rule within the whole field of criminal law. The rule of uniting objectivity and subjectivity have solved the problem of judging a conduct only by the harmful consequence or only by the intent of the conductor, both of these ideas are one-sided. But the problem of which factor plays the leading role, the objectivity or the subjectivity, is still to be solved. The author hold the idea that although both the harmful conducts and mens rea are needed to form a crime, while the later represents the nature of the crimes. In some sense, it can be said that between the objectivity or the subjectivity, the former is unified by the later, the later unified the former. The rule of mens rea should be advocated as a basic and key rule of criminal law.On one hand, mens rea can be taken as a conceptual fact, which exists as the psychological process, on the other hand, it is also takes the form of a natural conduct. So we can take two main approaches to judge mens rea, one is to review the statements of the suspects and the defendant, the other is to presumpt mens rea by checking the conducts. But in judicial practice, it is relatively common only to judge a crime by the conducts and harmful consequence, while neglecting the leading role of mens rea, the root lies in that the traditional main theories of criminal law takes serious harm to the society as the nature of a crime, neglecting the key role of mens rea in forming a crime, many scholars hold that mens rea is only a psychological phenomena, so it is too hard for the judge to grasp, the research for mens rea is just in an initial stage, we do not have effective technical support.