Guilt and the excuses

Hi, I’m Barry Lam, associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College, and the producer of Hi-Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. In this video, we’ll discuss when a criminal defendant should be excused rather than punished for their crime. The legal system uses the word “guilty” to describe an offender that it deems deserving of punishment. It's very telling that the system uses this word and not something else, like “wrongdoer.” That’s because there’s generally more to being guilty of a crime than being a wrongdoer. The guilty are wrongdoers that are also at fault, or to blame, for the wrongdoing And those aren’t the same thing. There was the famous case of Patty Hearst in the 1970s, who was kidnapped by a radical revolutionary group and held for 19 months, during which she was assaulted and indoctrinated. During her time in the group Hearst participated in an armed bank robbery and shooting, and planted explosives as part of a wave of terrorist activity. She was later arrested, charged, and sentenced for these crimes. But ultimately, two different Presidents, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton commuted her sentence and then fully pardoned her, not because Patty Hearst didn’t do these things, and not because they thought these things weren’t wrongs, but, among other things, because they felt she had an excuse. An excuse is an explanation of your criminal action that absolves you of blame for the wrong you committed. The law itself recognizes only a narrow range of excuses. There’s insanity, where a crime arises from a severe mental incapacitation, hallucination, or delusion. There’s coercion or duress, such as committing a crime under the threat of death or harm. There’s involuntary intoxication, or when you commit a crime as a result of being drugged unknowingly. And there are rarer excuses like Automatism, or when your body does something involuntary, like committing a crime while sleepwalking or medically unconscious. None of these legal excuses applied to Patty Hearst. Hearst became convinced by and sympathetic to her captor’s causes, she was allowed free movement after some time in the group, and didn’t escape when she had opportunities. And she was never drugged into doing the things she did. Even though Patty Hearst didn’t have a legal excuse, both Presidents Carter and Clinton may have been convinced she wasn’t at fault. After all, being abducted, assaulted, and then indoctrinated by a crime-syndicate at 19 is the kind of explanation of a wrongdoing that in our normal moral lives, would make for a good excuse. But that seems puzzling. Should Patty Hearst’s future have rested on the decision of these two Presidents rather than on the initial judgment of the court or in the law? The fact that there are more excuses we recognize in our moral lives than in our legal system seems like a potential source of injustice. If Patty Hearst is truly morally blameless for her actions, then isn’t there something wrong with the system that made her punishment possible in the first place? It seems that our legal system should give outcomes that line up with our moral judgments. This way, we don’t unjustly punish those who aren’t morally to blame. However, for this to work we would need a general test to determine when blame is appropriate versus when the explanation of a wrongdoing should count as an excuse. One such test posits that the emotion of guilt itself is the best test for determining appropriate blame. It starts with the observation that ordinary people with a conscience will feel guilty when they do a piece of culpable or blameworthy wrongdoing, but will not feel guilty if they had a moral excuse for that same wrongdoing. If you break a promise to a friend because you were just too lazy to keep it, you’d feel appropriately guilty because you’re to blame. But if you break a promise to a friend because you were being held at gunpoint by a robber, you could be sorry about it, but guilt would not be appropriate at all and neither would blame. This observation can be turned into a test of legal blame by asking whether a reasonable defendant, considering all of the facts and circumstances surrounding their act of wrongdoing, would feel guilt? If the answer is “yes”, then the defendant is morally blameworthy and thus deserving of punishment, and if the answer is “no,” then they have an excuse for their action and ought not to be punished. If this test were put into effect, it would greatly expand upon the current set of explanations that count as legal excuses. Some of these new excuses would include that the crime was committed as a result of addiction, that it arose from the perpetrator’s own experience as a victim of abuse, or that it arose from negligence or recklessnes resulting from low cognitive function. Perhaps it would even include crimes committed out of desperation and poverty. With this test in place, and the expansion of our notion of what counts as a legal excuse, it raises a challenging question: How many people are currently being punished who ought not to be? Many of the ordinary drivers of crime, especially repeated crimes, have psychological and sociological explanations that might not be fundamentally different from the kinds of conditions leading to Patty Hearst’s crimes. So if you believe that it was appropriate to excuse her, then shouldn’t you also believe it appropriate to excuse many other criminal offenders? What do you think?