Excuses moral and legal: a comment on Marcia Baron's "Excuses, excuses"

Citation

Duff RA (2007) Excuses moral and legal: a comment on Marcia Baron's "Excuses, excuses". Criminal Law and Philosophy, 1 (1), pp. 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-006-9003-0

Abstract
Marcia Baron has offered an illuminating and fruitful discussion of extra-legal excuses. What is particularly useful, and particularly important, is her focus on our excusatory practices—on the ways and contexts in which we make, offer, accept, bestow and reject excuses: if we are to reach an adequate understanding of excuses, their implications and their grounds, we must attend to the roles that they can play in our human activities and relationships—and to the complexities and particularities of those roles. However, I want to focus my comments less on the details of Baron’s discussions of excuses in extra-legal contexts than on the implications of her discussion for our understanding of excuses in the criminal law. What light (if any, a sceptic might add) can such analyses of our extra-legal concepts and practices throw on legal concepts and doctrines?

Keywords
; Justification (Law); Criminal liability; Criminal law Philosophy

Journal
Criminal Law and Philosophy: Volume 1, Issue 1

People

Professor Antony Duff

Emeritus Professor, Philosophy