Abstract
It is often thought that an agent is blameworthy only for wrongdoing she had a fair opportunity to avoid. However, in this article, I defend the thesis that there is a form of culpability for wrongdoing—exemplified by criminal guilt—that it is possible to accrue even for wrongdoing one lacked a fair opportunity to avoid. If I am right that criminal guilt, properly conceived, is not something everyone necessarily has a fair opportunity to avoid, an offender’s lack of fair opportunity to avoid her guilt would appear to be an important potential ground for mitigation at sentencing. Hence, the thesis of this article may point the way toward a novel explanation of a moral intuition that a coterie of moral, political, and legal theorists has for decades sought but struggled to vindicate: the intuition that offenders who have suffered from various social disadvantages should receive less punishment for their crimes, even when those crimes are not morally justified or excused.
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Notes
The idea that the moral appraisals we come to merit might be shaped by “luck,” in the sense of factors beyond our control, has long been theorized under the heading of “moral luck.” See generally Dana K. Nelkin, “Moral Luck”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/moral-luck/; Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck”, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), pp. 20–39; and Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck”, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), pp. 24–38. A leading theorist of moral luck who has recently canvassed the literature suggests that the forms of moral luck philosophers are most likely to accept are “constitutive” luck in the formation of our identities, followed by “circumstantial” luck in the choice situations that arise for us. Dana Kay Nelkin, “Thinking Outside of the (Traditional) Boxes of Moral Luck”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43(1) (2019): 7–23, at pp. 10–14. In this article, I argue that we can become blameworthy for wrongdoing, in an important sense, owing to a subset of the factors that moral luck theorists would classify as bad “constitutive” and “circumstantial” “luck” but that I would label unfair rather than unlucky.
The view that blameworthiness presupposes a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing is often associated with H.L.A. Hart. However, as we shall see in Sect. 6 of this article, in his famous reflections on the significance of a fair opportunity to avoid criminal wrongdoing, Hart aimed to show precisely that a person’s lack of fair opportunity to avoid a crime undercuts the justifiability of punishment for reasons independent of any impact it might have on a person’s moral desert or blameworthiness. See H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), especially pp. 14–24, 28–53, 173–185, and the discussion in Sect. 6infra. For a leading contemporary defense of the view that an agent’s moral blameworthiness for wrongdoing depends on her having the capacity and fair opportunity to avoid her wrongful conduct, see David O. Brink and Dana K. Nelkin, “Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility”, in David Shoemaker ed., Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), pp. 284–313.
That is not to deny that, for other purposes than criminal guilt, we might wish to assess a person’s “moral effort” relative to how conducive her circumstances were to acting in accordance with moral reason, or how well she has “play[ed] the [moral] hand [she was] dealt,” to quote memorable phrases from Pamela Hieronymi and David Enoch, respectively. Pamela Hieronymi, “The Force and Fairness of Blame”, Philosophical Perspectives 18(1) (2004): 115–148, at p. 134; and David Enoch, “Playing the Hand You’re Dealt: How Moral Luck Is Different from Morally Significant Plain Luck (and Probably Doesn’t Exist)”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43(1) (2019): 257–270.
In a very recent, kindred article that employs a different approach and set of premises, Victor Tadros has argued that social structures affect what people become responsible for, that it is bad for a person if she becomes responsible for wrongdoing, and that we should thus begin to theorize responsibility for wrongdoing itself as something that we, in an important sense, “distribute”—and ought to distribute fairly. Victor Tadros, “Distributing Responsibility”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 48(3) (2020): 223–261.
I do not have the space within the confines of this article to defend in detail the idea that lack of fair moral opportunity should be a mitigating factor at sentencing. However, I intend to do so in future work.
I have elsewhere offered a detailed review and critique of existing accounts of why socially disadvantaged offenders might have special moral claims to lesser punishment, even if their crimes are neither justified nor excused. See Benjamin Ewing, “Recent Work on Punishment and Criminogenic Disadvantage”, Law and Philosophy 37(1) (2018): 29–68.
I follow G.A. Cohen in distinguishing between something being “difficult,” in the sense of hard to accomplish, even if one tries, and it being “costly,” meaning that it carries with it burdens that make it less attractive. G.A. Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”, Ethics 99(4) (1989): 906–944, at pp. 918–919. Dana Nelkin draws a similar distinction using different terminology when she notes that “difficulty can be understood in at least two ways: on the one hand, it can be understood as requiring a great deal of effort, and, on the other, it can be understood as requiring a greater sacrifice of one’s interests.” Dana Kay Nelkin, “Difficulty and Degrees of Moral Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness”, Noûs 50(2) (2016): 356–378, at p. 357.
Jim Staihar has applied the label “type 1 defenses” to factors that “mitigate how badly [a wrongdoer] actually flouted the moral reasons against violating the rights of others in performing the act” and likewise noted that justifications are a subset of such defenses. See Jim Staihar, “A New Systematic Explanation of the Types and Mitigating Effects of Exculpatory Defenses”, New Criminal Law Review 12(2) (2009): 205–286, at pp. 211, 221.
It might be argued that conditions which diminish the net strength of the moral reasons against wrongdoing must be understood as (at least partial) justifications and not excuses. However, this seems false, at least as regards conditions that diminish the net strength of the moral reasons against wrongdoing only given the facts as the agent wrongly, and unreasonably, perceives them. There is a longstanding debate over whether or not reasonable mistaken beliefs in factual circumstances that would justify are themselves justifications. Compare Kent Greenawalt, “The Perplexing Borders of Justification and Excuse”, Columbia Law Review 84(8) (1984): 1897–1927 with Heidi M. Hurd, “Justification and Excuse, Wrongdoing and Culpability”, Notre Dame Law Review 74(5) (1999): 1551–1573. But one need not take a stand on that contested issue in order to endorse the less controversial proposition that unreasonable mistaken beliefs in would-be-justificatory factual circumstances can at most excuse, and not justify, wrongdoing. In any case, because it is possible to distinguish the moral reasons for and against a wrongful act (a) given the actual facts, (b) given the facts a reasonable observer would perceive, and (c) given the facts the agent perceives, one can treat both justification and excuse as about moral reasons for action while preserving a coherent distinction between justification and excuse.
See R v. Dudley and Stephens [1884] 14 Q.B.D. 273.
See Sienho Yee, “The Erdemovic Sentencing Judgement: A Questionable Milestone for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia”, Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 26(2) (1997): 263–309.
But see Peter Westen and James Mangiafico, “The Criminal Defense of Duress: A Justification, Not an Excuse—And Why It Matters”, Buffalo Criminal Law Review 6(2) (2003): 833–950.
Model Penal Code (Official Draft and Revised Comments) § 2.09(1) (1985).
See, e.g., R. v. Ryan, 2013 SCC 3 (Can.).
See, e.g., Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (with Stephen J. Morse), Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), pp. 156–158; Stephen J. Morse, “Undiminished Confusion in Diminished Capacity”, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 75(1) (1984): 1–55, at pp. 5–9; and Peter Arenella, “The Diminished Capacity and Diminished Responsibility Defenses: Two Children of a Doomed Marriage”, Columbia Law Review 77(6) (1977): 827–865.
It might also diminish the strength of the moral reasons against her conduct, given the facts that a “reasonable” person in her situation would perceive. For we might wish to individualize or relativize the “reasonable” person so as to imagine her as a reasonable person with certain of the accused’s characteristics, potentially including her youth and learning disability. There is an obvious sense in which a learning disability alters what it is “reasonable” to expect of a person, and thus may negate or reduce a certain measure of objective fault that the person would otherwise accrue for some act or omission. However, it is a thorny matter of dispute to what extent personal characteristics of the accused should be included in the law’s assessment of what a reasonable person in the accused’s circumstances would have known or done. The Supreme Court of Canada, for instance, has held that objective fault standards in the criminal law are not to be individualized or relativized to take account of varying personal traits and abilities, except to the point of recognizing that certain ones (e.g. being blind or deaf) can render a person wholly incapable of appreciating a particular risk, which must in fairness be taken into account in assessing whether that person behaved unreasonably. See especially R. v. Creighton, [1993] 3 S.C.R. 3 (Can.); see also R. v. Javanmardi, 2019 SCC 54 (Can.).
The distinction between latent and active capacity is a familiar and intuitive one illustrated easily through examples. I have the latent but not active capacity, for instance, to play the clarinet or to speak French. Though there is a fundamental sense in which I have the capacity to do both, I have not cultivated my capacity by taking lessons or practicing.
Erin I. Kelly, “What Is an Excuse?” in D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini eds., Blame: Its Nature and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013), pp. 244–262.
Id., p. 256.
Id.
Id., pp. 248, 258–259.
Id., p. 248.
Like Kelly, I am also focused here on obstacles to acting in accordance with moral reason that make it difficult or costly, rather than impossible.
For this reason, I am skeptical of Christopher Lewis’s contention that the law has reason to judge a wrongdoer less morally culpable if he had an objectively stronger incentive to offend in the sense of greater Rawlsian “primary-good-related payoffs” or “enhance[d]… opportunities to live a life [one has] reason to value.” See Christopher Lewis, “Inequality, Incentives, Criminality, and Blame”, Legal Theory 22(2) (2016): 153–180, at pp. 161–170 (quoting p. 162).
Gary Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme”, in Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), pp. 219–259.
T.M. Scanlon, “Forms and Conditions of Responsibility”, in Randolph Clarke, Michael McKenna, and Angela M. Smith eds., The Nature of Moral Responsibility: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015), pp. 89–111, at pp. 98–99.
The way I have glossed this distinction tracks Scanlon’s distinction between “responsibility as attributability” and “substantive responsibility.” See T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1998), pp. 248–249. Others have drawn similar distinctions. See, e.g., Gary Watson, “Two Faces of Responsibility”, in Agency and Answerability, pp. 260–288 (distinguishing “attributability” and “accountability”).
On one reading of R. Jay Wallace’s influential work on blameworthiness in his book Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994), he takes resentment to be “something like a sanction” and further supposes that “it is morally unfair to sanction someone for violating a norm if he lacked the capacity to recognize and respond to the reasons for complying with it at the time of action.” The quoted language comes from Gideon Rosen, “The Alethic Conception of Moral Responsibility”, in The Nature of Moral Responsibility, pp. 65–87, at p. 79.
See, e.g., Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, p. 83.
Rosen, “The Alethic Conception of Moral Responsibility”, p. 83.
Id.
Gideon Yaffe, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018), p. 73. For another similar view, see Alexander Sarch, “Who Cares What You Think? Criminal Culpability and the Irrelevance of Unmanifested Mental States”, Law and Philosophy 36(6) (2017): 707–750.
Alexander and Ferzan (with Morse), Crime and Culpability. See also Larry Alexander, “Insufficient Concern: A Unified Conception of Criminal Culpability”, California Law Review 88(3) (2000): 931–954. Alexander and Ferzan are, controversially, skeptics about negligence as a form of criminal fault. However, we can easily tweak their basic theory to make it open to criminal negligence by simply making criminal culpability a function of the risks that the offender knew or ought to have known she was running, and her reasons for running them.
Peter Westen, for instance, has argued that when an offender has an excuse for wrongdoing, it is because her conduct does not manifest a faulty attitude (or as faulty an attitude) toward others’ rights and interests as it ordinarily would absent the excuse. Peter Westen, “An Attitudinal Theory of Excuse”, Law and Philosophy 25(3) (2006): 289–375.
In the criminal law context, this assumption seems particularly plausible. For surely the main reasons why most crimes are—and should be—proscribed have to do with the impact that such offenses have on other people.
Yaffe, The Age of Culpability, p. 77.
See especially Brink and Nelkin, “Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility”.
See David O. Brink, “Partial Responsibility and Excuse”, in Heidi M. Hurd ed., Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities: Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018), pp. 39–59.
Two jurisdictions’ disagreement about whether even to recognize that an offender’s disadvantaged background may be a mitigating factor at sentencing reinforces the obvious truth that a disadvantaged background like Harris’s is not a recognized defense to criminal liability. Cf. Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, s. 718.2(e) (Can.) (“[A]ll available sanctions, other than imprisonment, that are reasonable in the circumstances and consistent with the harm done to victims or to the community should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders.”) (emphasis mine) with United States Sentencing Commission, Guidelines Manual, §5H1.12, p.s. (Nov. 2018) (“Lack of guidance as a youth and similar circumstances indicating a disadvantaged upbringing are not relevant grounds in determining whether a departure [from the guideline sentencing range] is warranted.”).
The contrast I am imagining one could draw here between a narrower sense of culpability relevant to guilt and a broader sense relevant to sentencing is different from another more familiar distinction between “narrow” and “broad” senses of culpability: the distinction between mens rea in the narrow sense of the “mental state” or fault required as an element of a crime and mens rea in the broader sense of overall blameworthiness, taking account of exculpatory affirmative defenses and aggravating and mitigating factors. Versions of that latter distinction are constructed and employed, for example, in Douglas Husak, “‘Broad’ Culpability and the Retributivist Dream”, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 9(2) (2012): 449–485; and David O. Brink, “The Nature and Significance of Culpability”, Criminal Law and Philosophy 13(2) (2019): 347–373.
I do not deny that there can be “partial excuses” appropriately considered at sentencing rather than guilt. If a special circumstance weakened the balance of moral reasons against one’s offense, but not enough to negate one’s liability or reduce one’s offense of conviction, then it is an excellent candidate to be treated as a partially exculpatory mitigating factor at sentencing. What I suggest here is only that obstacles to avoiding wrongdoing that did not weaken or counterbalance the moral reasons against an offender’s crime are better conceived of as non-exculpatory mitigating factors. For a detailed analysis of distinct types of mitigating factors, which includes a fuller account than I can offer here of the difference between partially exculpatory mitigating factors and non-exculpatory mitigating factors, see Benjamin Ewing, “Mitigating Factors: A Typology”, in Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), pp. 423–442.
Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), p. 313 (“For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves.”) (cited in Samuel Scheffler, “Justice and Desert in Liberal Theory”, California Law Review 88(3) (2000): 965–990, at p. 977).
Peter Westen, “The Concept of Equal Opportunity”, Ethics 95(4) (1985): 837–850, at pp. 840–841.
As previously noted—see supra note 7—in distinguishing the “difficult” from the “costly,” I draw on the technical contrast between the two presented in Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”, pp. 918–919.
However, we should not say that a person’s opportunity to achieve X has become poorer merely because it has become cheaper or easier for her to achieve Y, such that the “opportunity cost” of achieving X (i.e. the overall alternative achievement she must forgo for it) has risen.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books 2013). For related discussion, see Richard L. Lippke, “Diminished Opportunities, Diminished Capacities: Social Deprivation and Punishment”, Social Theory and Practice 29(3) (2003): 459–485; and Richard L. Lippke, “Chronic Temptation, Reasonable Firmness and the Criminal Law”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 34(1) (2014): 75–96.
See, e.g., Paul K. Piff, et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior”, PNAS 109(11) (2012): 4086–4091.
As Michael Moore has noted in the context of a discussion of excuses: “Our opportunities to avoid wrongful action are not unfairly diminished [in a way that would excuse us for wrongdoing] simply because they are diminished.” Michael S. Moore, “Choice, Character, and Excuse”, Social Philosophy and Policy 7(2) (1990): 29–58, at p. 40.
Richard Lippke has emphasized that people from disadvantaged backgrounds face systematically more “moderately hard choices” about whether to do wrong and he has argued that “chronic temptation” should be a partial excuse. See Lippke, “Diminished Opportunities, Diminished Capacities” and Lippke, “Chronic Temptation”.
See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 282–290.
See Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, especially pp. 14–24, 28–53, 173–185. Hart stresses that distributive principles of punishment need not be seen as about giving people what they deserve and can instead be seen as about ensuring that “each individual is given a fair opportunity to choose between keeping the law required for society’s protection or paying the penalty.” Id., pp. 22–23.
Id., especially pp. 22–24, 44–50, 181–182. See also Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 256–267.
Talk of benefits, burdens, and fairness may for some readers conjure theories of retributive desert based on “fair play,” which take an offender to deserve punishment because this will disgorge her of some unfair advantage she has accrued by her crime. For a helpful recent review of variants of “fair play” retributivism, and a renewed defense of a particular conception of it, see Peter Westen, “Retributive Desert as Fair Play”, in Kimberly Kessler Ferzan and Stephen J. Morse eds., Legal, Moral, and Metaphysical Truths: The Philosophy of Michael S. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), pp. 63–78. However, in suggesting that we might conceive of fair moral opportunity as an ideal of fairness connected to the distribution of the burdens of punishment, I am neither suggesting that offenders reap unfair advantages by their crimes, nor that they deserve punishment in consequence. Nor am I suggesting that, if an offender has had a fair opportunity to avoid punishment, fairness or justice requires or even encourages us to punish that person. Instead, I am following Hart in conceiving of punishment as having certain forward-looking aims, our pursuit of which must be constrained by the principle that people be given a fair opportunity to avoid punishment. A complete theory of fair opportunity to avoid punishment would have to consider all the benefits and burdens people bear in relation to the institution of punishment and how they are distributed—not merely the burdens of being punished. But my aim here is only to defend the existence, and tentatively sketch the content, of a particular component of a theory of fair opportunity to avoid punishment: norms of fairness governing the allocation across society of opportunities to act in accordance with the moral reasons to refrain from crime and thereby avoid liability to punishment.
See Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 14–24, 28–53, 173–185. A central aim of Hart’s account of fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing is to explain and justify the excuses from liability that the criminal law recognizes. By contrast, my account of “fair moral opportunity” seeks to explain the lingering moral significance of special obstacles to avoiding crime that do not justify or excuse it. Intriguingly, but in passing and without expounding upon the observation at any length, Hart once noted that existing legal excuses designed to give people a fair opportunity to avoid criminal liability might well offer little value or comfort to offenders whose backgrounds of extreme poverty or disadvantage made it extraordinarily challenging for them to avoid their crimes. Id., pp. 50–51. My view also differs from Hart’s in that, as seen in Sect. 2, I believe there is a more direct and powerful explanation of defenses to criminal guilt than lack of fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. The first and foremost reason for recognizing most defenses to criminal liability is that such defenses will have at least partially negated or counterbalanced the moral reasons against criminal wrongdoing given the facts either as they actually were, as a reasonable person would have perceived them to be, or as the actual offender perceived them to be.
Of course, for perhaps as long as equal opportunity has been a salient ideal, so too has there been a concern that it may stand in tension with respect for special parental and familial relationships. See, e.g., Westen, “The Concept of Equal Opportunity”, p. 849 (citing James S. Fishkin, Justice, Equal Opportunity, and the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press 1983) for the thought that there may be a tension between equal opportunity and “family autonomy”); and Charles Frankel, “Equality of Opportunity”, Ethics 81(3) (1971): 191–211, at p. 206.
We may have good reasons to want it sometimes to be difficult or costly to do the right thing—in order, for instance, that we strengthen or more clearly exhibit our moral muscles. But it would make a perverse, ascetic fetish out of moral virtue to prefer that our lives on the whole be ones in which it is difficult and costly to do what moral reason requires of us.
For discussion of the idea of primary social goods and their role as the bundle of resources to which Rawls’s difference principle applies, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999), pp. 78–81.
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, Erin Kelly ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2001), p. 59. See also Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., pp. 54, 386–391.
For a general critique of the “distributive paradigm” of justice, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990), pp. 15–38.
See Cohen, “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”.
Sharon Dolovich has argued that in thinking about criminal justice, we should consider that behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” we would not know for certain whether we would end up facing criminal punishment, in part because the veil would obscure the “morally arbitrary” variance in “pressures to offend” that we might ultimately face. Sharon Dolovich, “Legitimate Punishment in Liberal Democracy”, Buffalo Criminal Law Review 7(2) (2004): 307–442, at pp. 356–378. I am concerned that some people find it especially difficult and costly to avoid criminal guilt due to constraints on their opportunities that are not merely unfortunate but unfair—especially ones that arise from independently wrongful or unjust treatment of them.
I thank Eric Fish for posing this helpfully concrete query.
The locus classicus in which these different senses of harm are analyzed is Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Vol. 1: Harm to Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), pp. 31–36.
See Jules L. Coleman, Risks and Wrongs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), p. 324 (arguing “that the duty of wrongdoers in corrective justice is to repair the wrongful losses for which they are responsible”).
See Jeffrey W. Howard, “Moral Subversion and Structural Entrapment”, Journal of Political Philosophy 24(1) (2016): 24–46. Howard defines “moral subversion” in terms of being made more likely to do wrong—albeit by “morally unprotected” behavior by others. Id., p. 33.
Victor Tadros has suggested something similar by contending that there may be a “duty to counterbalance the bad luck of it being inevitable that a particular person is responsible for wrongdoing… with the good luck of his being provided with welfare-generating resources.” Tadros, “Distributing Responsibility”, pp. 243–244.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., p. 73.
Howard makes a claim about what he calls “moral subversion” that is analogous to my claim that fair moral opportunity is an underappreciated reason to avoid injustice and wrongdoing in general: “If I am right… that prevailing socio-economic injustices are [morally] subversive, this makes them significantly morally worse than we initially believed.” Howard, “Moral Subversion and Structural Entrapment”, p. 45.
See especially Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed., pp. 52–65, 73–78.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on two chapters of my Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton University, Department of Politics, 2016). I am grateful to the many audiences and people who contributed to the development of the ideas herein, both in their early stages as part of the dissertation and in their more recent iterations. I am particularly indebted to my dissertation advisors Philip Pettit, Chuck Beitz, and Steve Macedo. I also owe special thanks to the following: Guyora Binder and participants in the SUNY Buffalo Criminal Law Center Colloquium Series who engaged with early versions of some of the ideas in this article; Kim Ferzan and participants in the law school seminar in which she shared and discussed a distant predecessor of this article; Matt Adler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and other participants in the reading group they organized to discuss work from my doctoral dissertation when I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke Law; and participants in the Queen’s Law Faculty Workshop and Queen’s Political Philosophy Reading Group for their feedback on a draft of this article. The development of my ideas also benefited from exchanges with Chuck Ewing, Jesse McCarthy, Alan Patten, Anna Stilz, and Tim Stoll. I thank the University Center for Human Values at Princeton for supporting me for a year as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow, during which time I made important headway on the foundations of ideas in this article. Finally, I wish to recognize the generosity of an anonymous reviewer for this journal whose very clear and specific suggestions sparked fruitful final edits.
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Ewing, B. Criminal Responsibility and Fair Moral Opportunity. Criminal Law, Philosophy 17, 291–316 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09621-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09621-5