Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (2):29-58 (1990)
Abstract |
Freud justified his extensive theorizing about dreams by the observation that they were “the royal road” to something much more general: namely, our unconscious mental life. The current preoccupation with the theory of excuse in criminal law scholarship can be given a similar justification, for the excuses are the royal road to theories of responsibility generally. The thought is that if we understand why we excuse in certain situations but not others, we will have also gained a much more general insight into the nature of responsibility itself. Nowhere has this thought been more evident than in the century-old focus of criminal law theoreticians on the excuse of insanity, a focus that could not be justified by the importance of the excuse itself. In this paper I wish to isolate two theories of excuse, each of which instantiates its own distinctive theory of responsibility. One is what I shall call the choice theory of excuse, according to which one is excused for the doing of a wrongful action because and only because at the moment of such action's performance, one did not have sufficient capacity or opportunity to make the choice to do otherwise. Such a choice theory of excuse instantiates a more general theory of responsibility, according to which we are responsible for wrongs we freely choose to do, and not responsible for wrongs we lacked the freedom to avoid doing. The second I shall call the character theory of excuse, according to which one is excused for the doing of a wrongful action because and only because such action is not determined by those enduring attributes of ourselves we call our characters.
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DOI | 10.1017/S0265052500000753 |
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References found in this work BETA
Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
The Concept of Mind.Gilbert Ryle - 1949 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 141:125-126.
Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action.Benjamin Libet - 1985 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (4):529-66.
The view from nowhere.Thomas Nagel - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (2):221-222.
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Citations of this work BETA
Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence.Michael S. Moore & Heidi M. Hurd - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (2):147-198.
Reasonable Expectations, Moral Responsibility, and Empirical Data.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2020 - Philosophical Studies (10):2945-2968.
Relating Neuroscience to Responsibility: Comments on Hirstein, Sifferd, and Fagan’s Responsible Brains.Michael S. Moore - forthcoming - Criminal Law and Philosophy:1-16.
A New Interpretivist Metasemantics for Fundamental Legal Disagreements.François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter & Kevin Toh - 2020 - Legal Theory 26 (1):62-99.
Responsibility, Alcoholism, and Liver Transplantation.Walter Glannon - 1998 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 23 (1):31 – 49.
View all 18 citations / Add more citations
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