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Responsibility and the Abuse Excuse*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Michael Stocker
Michael Stocker
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Syracuse University
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Extract

Does a woman's being repeatedly battered by her husband excuse her killing him while he was asleep? This and similar questions are often dealt with by asking a more general question, “Should we accept abuse excuses?” These questions engender a lot of heat, but little light, in the media and other public forums, and even in the writings of many theorists. They have been discussed as if there is a typical abuse excuse we can examine in order to examine abuse excuses in general. Similarly, the question of whether we should accept abuse excuses has often been discussed as if it is simple and straightforward. But there is no one typical abuse excuse, and the question of whether to accept such excuses is neither simple nor straightforward. There are many different abuse excuses, many different circumstances in which they are deployed, and many different sorts of concerns motivating their use. In this, abuse excuses are just like other, well-accepted excuses, such as self-defense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 175 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1999

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References

1 Dershowitz, Alan, The Abuse Excuse and Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1994)Google Scholar is not the most egregious of the works which purport to show this, but it is a good place to start. Moreover, it provides a useful list of new excuses that Dershowitz and many others find so objectionable. A good source on the complexities of abuse excuses and similar excuses is the symposium in the Spring 1996 issue, volume 57, of the University of Pittsburgh Law Review.

2 Wilson, James Q., Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? (New York: Basic Books, 1997).Google Scholar

3 The first quote is from ibid., 3, the second from ibid., 23–24. (Insofar as clarity allows, page references will henceforth be given in the text.) The internal notes are Wilson's. Note iii refers to Dershowitz, , The Abuse Excuse, 321–41Google Scholar. I will follow Wilson in, perhaps mislead-ingly, calling all these new, controversial excuses, abuse excuses, even though only some have to do with abuse.

Note iv refers to Delgado, Richard, “‘Rotten Social Background’: Should the Criminal Law Recognize a Defense of Severe Environmental Deprivation?” Law and Inequality Journal 3 (1985): 9Google Scholar; and to Bazelon, David L., “The Morality of the Criminal Law,” Southern California Law Review 49 (1976): 385Google Scholar. These two essays are reprinted in Justification and Excuse in the Criminal Law, ed. Corrado, Michael Louis (New York: Garland, 1994)Google Scholar. Bazelon's article is discussed briefly below.

4 On learned helplessness, see Walker, Lenore, Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)Google Scholar. Other references can be found in Downs, Donald Alexander, More Than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar

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20 See, for example, Moore, Michael S., “Choice, Character, and Excuse,” Social Philosophy and Policy 7, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 29–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arenella, Peter, “Convicting the Morally Blameless: Reassessing the Relationship between Legal and Moral Accountability,” UCLA Law Review 39 (1992): 1151Google Scholar; and Arenella, , “Character, Choice, and Moral Agency: The Relevance of Character to Our Moral Culpability Judgments,” Social Philosophy and Policy 7, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 59–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moore's article and Arenella, 's “Character, Choice, and Moral Agency”Google Scholar are reprinted in Corrado, , ed., justification and Excuse in the Criminal Law.Google Scholar

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24 My thanks are owed to Alvin Goldman for raising this latter point.

25 See, e.g., Care, Norman, Living with One's Past: Personal Fate and Moral Pain (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).Google Scholar

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28 I have been helped here by Arenella's discussion of Strawson, , in “Convicting the Morally Blameless,” 1535–44.Google Scholar

29 Bellas, Christopher and Sundelson, David, The New Informants: The Betrayal of Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), 80–82.Google Scholar

30 My thanks are owed here to Judge Angela Karpin of the District Court, New South Wales, Australia.