The Culpability Question

This chapter examines categories of culpability recognised by international criminal courts for attributing criminal responsibility for system crimes to individuals in different institutional contexts: first, modes of participation doctrines, by which international criminal courts connect individuals to the commission of crimes; and second, grounds for excluding responsibility and desert-based mitigating factors, by which international criminal courts exclude the responsibility or mitigate the punishment of individuals in light of the situational pressures of their social contexts. Critically examining these categories, the chapter reveals a tendency on the part of international criminal courts to selectively contextualise the behaviour of the defendants on trial for the purpose of determining their culpability—demonstrating greater concern for identifying links between individuals and system crimes than attempting to understand how individuals may be acculturated into violence by situational pressures stemming from the collective and systemic dimensions of the mass atrocity contexts in which they operated.

Broke people, broken rules: Explaining welfare fraud investigators’ attributions

There is a notable contrast between welfare clients’ and welfare fraud investigators’ accounts of rule breaking behaviors. Clients describe some actions (or inactions) that constitute rule violations as accidental, and tend to attribute others to situational factors: program rules’ complexity, the exigencies of day-to-day subsistence, and time and energy limitations. Fraud investigators, on the other hand, are comparatively likely to identify rule breaking as deliberate and cite clients’ dispositions to explain the behavior. In part, this disparity reflects the “fundamental attribution error,” the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors’ role in driving others’ behavior. However, evidence from interviews with welfare fraud workers from five US states reveals the impactful administrative and normative factors that encourage them to make and assert attributions of intentionality and dispositional motivation. First, administrative priorities foreground intentional violations: federal authorities financially incentivize deliberate fraud charges, and managers favor these cases, which permit client suspensions and disqualifications. Second, emphasizing internal motivations over situational pressures serves a valuable normative function, establishing punished clients’ blameworthiness and thus defending the legitimacy of both individual fraud workers and the units they compose. These findings demonstrate how policy structures and enforcement practices do not just respond to blameworthy or legally culpable behavior, but help construct narratives of blameworthiness and culpability.

Moral Failure

In his most recent book, Daniel Batson develops a psychological theory of moral motivation by looking at moral failure. Even under favorable conditions, Batson argues, people frequently behave immorally. In addition to defects of character or judgment and situational pressures, a lack of moral integrity plays an important role in explaining moral failure. Batson’s book sheds light on the most common sources of immoral behavior, providing moral philosophers with the resources to properly target their reasons to be moral.

Filling in the gaps: The interpretation ofcurricula vitaein peer review

In this article, we study the use of curricula vitae (CV) for competitive funding decisions in science. The typically sober administrative style of academic résumés evokes the impression of straightforwardly conveyed, objective evidence on which to base comparisons of past achievements and future potentials. We instead conceptualize the evaluation of biographical evidence as a generative interplay between an historically grown, administrative infrastructure (the CV), and a situated evaluative practice in which the representational function of that infrastructure is itself interpreted and established. The use of CVs in peer review can be seen as a doubly comparative practice, where referees compare not only applicants (among each other or to an imagined ideal of excellence), but also their own experience-based understanding of practice and the conceptual assumptions that underpin CV categories. Empirically, we add to existing literature on peer review by drawing attention to self-correcting mechanisms in the reproduction of the scientific workforce. Conceptually, we distinguish three modalities of how the doubly comparative use of CVs can shape the assessment of applicants: calibration, branching out, and repair. The outcome of this reflexive work should not be seen as predetermined by situational pressures. In fact, bibliographic categories such as authorship of publications or performance metrics may themselves come to be problematized and reshaped in the process.

Sexual Abuse of Elderly Women in Southwest Nigeria: A Sociological Exposition of an Emerging Crime

Indeed, appreciable research has considered the dynamics of sexual assault involving young victims. However, very little criminological research has considered the dynamics of sexual abuse of elderly people. To fill this void, this current study developed a profile of sexual abuse cases among women aged 50 and older, based on the accounts of their abusers. Specifically, the study investigated the motives and mechanisms for sexual abuse of the aged in the country as well as the factors that account for the vulnerability of aged women. A sample of 21 elderly sexual abuse offenders from six prisons in Ogun and Lagos states were purposively engaged to shed some light on the nature and dimensions of sexual abuse of elderly women in the country. Results from qualitative analyses of official demographic and offence history data, and in-depth interviews of offenders challenge a couple of commonly held beliefs, assumptions and assertions about sexual abuse of elderly in literature, news journals and public discourse. As against a general belief that young men that sexually abuse older women are ‘money ritualists,’ this study found sexual violence history, mental illness, substance abuse, and sexual deviancy as factors fuelling perpetrators’ action. The majority of perpetrators were intrafamiliar offenders who are family members, neighbours, workers and associates of the victims. Offenders expressed awareness of usual non-reporting of sexual victimisation by the abused, which is a factor that encourages intrafamiliar offending. As a growing social menace in Nigeria, sexual abuse of the elderly is factored by neglect, and exposure of adults to both environmental and situational pressures. Therefore, proper caregiving, meeting of essential needs of the elderly, response from the criminal justice system and encouraging reportage of sexual victimisation are suggested.

Situationism and War Crimes

Chapter 2 applies the situationist view to war crimes. A number of the experiments discussed in Chapter 1 focus on situations that seem directly relevant to the circumstances in which war crimes occur. For this reason, several social psychologists and philosophers argue that situationism offers the most plausible explanation of how and why war crimes occur. According to the situationist view, war crimes can occur as a result of both immediate battlefield conditions, and the ongoing situational pressures of military training and culture. Advocates of this view argue that this combination of situational forces undermines the ability of military personnel to recognize and act on relevant moral considerations, leading them to believe that certain acts, such as torture, are permissible. Thus military personnel may be unable to recognize illegal and immoral orders, even in situations arising far from the heat of battle.

Introduction

IN THE IRAQI TOWN of Haditha in 2005, US Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Charges against six Marines were dropped and a seventh was acquitted. How should we assess this and similar incidents? On the one hand, punishing the Marines might be unreasonable since they were subject to extreme situational pressures leading up to the massacre, including combat stress, exposure to constant attacks, and the loss of one of their own. On the other hand, perhaps they ...

Excusing Perpetrators

Chapter 4 turns to the issue of perpetrators’ moral responsibility. We consider various arguments for the conclusion that perpetrators have access to excuses allowing them to avoid moral blame for their actions. For example, some philosophers have argued that, as a result of situational pressures, it is often unreasonable to expect military personnel to accurately assess the moral status of their behavior and so it is often unfair to blame perpetrators for their wrongdoing. Concerns about moral luck might also suggest that perpetrators are not open to moral blame: if it is a matter of bad luck that military personnel are exposed to pressures that lead them to act as they do, then perhaps it is unfair to blame them for their actions.

War Crimes

In 2005, US Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. How should we assess the perpetrators of this and other war crimes? Is it unfair to blame the Marines because they were subject to situational pressures such as combat stress? Or should they be held responsible for their actions, since they intentionally chose to kill civilians? In this book, we take up these questions and propose a provocative theory of the causes of war crimes and the responsibility of perpetrators. In the first half of the book, we criticize accounts that explain war crimes by reference to external situational pressures, such as peer pressure, combat stress, and propaganda. We develop an alternative theory of war crimes that explains how military personnel make sense of their participation in war crimes through the lens of their self-conceptions, goals, and values. In the second half of the book, we reject theories of responsibility that excuse perpetrators on the grounds that situational pressures often lead them to believe that their behavior is permissible. Such theories are, we contend, unacceptably exculpating and imply that it’s unreasonable for victims of war crimes to blame their attackers. In contrast, we argue that perpetrators of war crimes may be blameworthy if their actions express objectionable attitudes toward their victims, even if they sincerely believe that what they are doing is right. In addition, we show that the demand that victims of war crimes forego blame fails to show sufficient regard for their moral standing.

The Holocaust

Chapter 2 traces the history of psychological thinking about Hitler, the Nazi accession to power, and, eventually, the Holocaust. Explanations of these phenomena took several forms. Some focused on putative psychopathology, either of Nazi leaders or Germans as a whole; some focused on particular German cultural and social adaptations that were thought to produce particularly obedient and authoritarian individuals; still others emphasized the interaction of some or all of these factors with long-term, large-scale historical and cultural processes. Gordon Allport saw prejudice and racism as central to understanding the Holocaust. After Stanley Milgram’s studies appeared in the early 1960s, genocidal behavior was largely seen by psychologists as an obedient response to situational pressures. Recent decades have brought greater diversity in social psychological explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust and in genocide more generally.