Fair Opportunity and Responsibility

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a response-independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. Consequently, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent’s capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities—normative competence—and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference—situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

Conclusion

Attraction, seduction, frustrated loves, crimes of passion, inform the plots of countless stories, films, and plays. These themes, while time worn, are also alluring challenges for creative artists. It explains the unending popularity of the story of Carmen and its modern remakes. Passion, once considered an illness, has since the eighteenth century gained acceptance and marriages of the heart are now commonplace and these have displaced the social stratification and sexual regulations that once defined marriage. The story of Carmen speaks to these societal changes in intimate human relations. Many of themes found in Bizet’s opera and Mérimée’s novella (seduction, sacrifice, law and lawlessness, racism, misogyny to name but a few) offer sources of inspiration to many artists. But the often-told story of Carmen also raises the question of originality in art.

Robert Paul Churchill, Women in the Crossfire: Understanding and Ending Honor Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), ISBN 978–0–190–46856–9, 334 pages.

Women in the Crossfire, a book by philosopher Paul Churchill, is a significant contribution to efforts to understand honor killing. Too many works speak generally about gender-based violence. By focusing just on one type of gender-based violence, Professor Churchill is able to give us a number of insights into the crime than would otherwise be possible. True to his philosopher roots, he spends significant time in defining honor killings and distinguishing them from other crimes, such as crimes of passion, domestic violence, and politically-motivated violence. Defining honor killings allows him to better investigate its history, scope, causes, and solutions. The author explores honor killing from an empirical, cultural, psychological, and historical perspective.