Culpability

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In criminal law, culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his conduct".^[1] Culpability therefore marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible, and a randomly occurring event, like naturally occurring earthquakes or naturally arriving meteorites, for which no human can be held responsible.