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To resume the discussion from the post immediately below (technical difficulties):

The law defines as a crime as the commission of a prohibited act (actus reus) with a culpable mental state (mens rea). The Model Penal Code identifies four relevant mental states - purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and neglect. Any legislative definition of a crime should state with specificity which degree of culpable mental states are required to render the prohibited act criminal. There are some rules of construction for determining relevant mental states when the legislative text is silent. A special category of legal wrongs - termed "violations" - are ascribed without reference to any mental state. There's some great potential for mischief in that category, but that's discussion for another time.

It's a commonplace among lawyers that "motive is often confused with intent" by lay people. Motive is not used by the law to determine criminality - rather, it is offered as evidence to establish the existence of a culpable mental state. If I stand to inherit $20 million upon your death, that fact supports the inference that I purposely caused your death. My motive of self-enrichment reinforces the conclusion that I intended to murder. If I shot my best friend under the overpass, my lack of motive may support the inference that I neglectfully caused his death.

Once this legal distinction has been grasped, lawyers are free to snicker at the moral simpletons who ascribe moral value directly to motives. You may find it more abominable that a killer murdered to gratify abnormal sexual lust than that another murdered to acquire financial gain. But the lawyer would reduce both motives to identical significance - they establish that the actions were intended to kill and thus place both murderers in the same category of culpability.

Of course, the law often retains the same categories it licenses its practitioners to demean. Motive does acquire legal significance within the context of "justification and excuse" - moral calculations that are performed subsequent to the determination of criminal guilt. Under the law you may have purposely killed your wife's lover, but your motive of blind rage may yet exonerate you. You may have intended the death of the mugger, but your motive of self-defense may justify it. Your motive doesn't abolish the criminality of your act, but may excuse or justify it.

The archaic category "abandoned and malignant heart" does represent a normative judgment on the moral value of motives. Those who ascribe to the ALI's schema of culpability treat this description as a quaint relic, a laughable expression of the conceptual chaos which bedevilled earlier schemes of criminal law. The mockery is inappropriate, because it does submerge the very real moral gap lying between the law as it was and the law as it seeks to be (and to be fair, many state legal systems have been resistant to many of the proposals of the Model Penal).

But the law seldom claims to be co-extensive with morality. The law requires adherence to its precepts. It allows moral disagreement with those precepts. The impossibility of moral consensus makes law necessary - no action is so abhorrent that no person would do it. If any action were so abhorrent, no law would be required to prohibit it, since there would be no danger of such a crime's commission.

So, as a person struggling with American law, I perhaps have two issues. The first is what the moral value of motive properly should be. The second is what the legal value of motive should be. Morally, we do have intutions about which motives are noble, which are execrable, and how they may be meaningfully compared to one another. But the law can't deal with mere intuitions. It seeks to give form to those intuitions so that legal standards can be navigated even by those who are morally estranged from the legal system's foundations.

It seems an easy case that laying out an anticipatory scheme of motives would be more difficult than laying out a coherent scheme of intentions. But the difficulty of articulating a taxonomy of motives may be a simple function of the present absence of such a taxonomy. Nothing in the ALI's scheme of intention is self-evident, and the manner of its articulation is clearly the product of intensive reflection. Presumably similar attention could be paid to the issue of motive, leading to articulation of a "system of motive" equally comprehensive and general to the that of intention.

But does one want a legal system tailored to judge the evil of subjectivities? Is that even a good idea? Might it be a necessary one?