Abstract

Moral responsibility is a prerequisite for culpability. One can be morally responsible for φing without being culpable for it, but not vice versa. I agree with Andrew Simester on this, and agree that it is important to differentiate moral responsibility from culpability. That moral responsibility is a prerequisite for culpability is often taken to require sharply distinguishing excuses from what are called ‘exemptions’ (or to use the term Simester uses, ‘irresponsibility defences’) and treating exemptions as forming a category of their own. I am not convinced that it does. In previous work, I have gone against the prevailing view by understanding the category of excuses to include what, on that view, are classified as exemptions. In this paper I reconsider this, delving deeper into the matter than I have in the past and drawing on Simester’s magisterial Fundamentals of Criminal Law to do so. I challenge the position that exemptions form a category of their own, distinct from excuses, and that infancy and insanity need to be understood as exemptions and not excuses. I argue that the category of exemptions, or “irresponsibility defenses,” is problematic, and that recognizing the distinction between culpability and moral responsibility and recognizing its importance does not commit one to excluding from the category of excuses infancy and insanity. Infancy and insanity are better seen as operating to exempt the agent altogether from moral responsibility only at the limit; more often, they operate to excuse, partially or fully.