Responsibility, Mental Capacities, and Socially Deprived Offenders

The relationship between social justice and criminal justice gives rise to a range of important ethical questions. The purpose of this paper is to consider an influential argument within this field: namely, the responsibility-based argument for social adversity mitigation. According to this argument, offenders with a ‘rotten social background’ should be given a sentence mitigation because they have less-developed mental capacities than offenders who have not experienced deep social deprivation. However, it is argued, first, that even if the empirical assumptions of this argument are correct, the conclusion is nevertheless premature. Second, it is shown that both the relations between diminished capacities and reduced responsibility, and between reduced responsibility and sentence mitigation give rise to several theoretical challenges. Finally, it is considered whether these challenges can be held to arise from an overambitious view of what should be expected from a penal ethical theory or from a failure to draw on proper standardizations in this sort of theorizing. It is concluded that it constitutes a highly complicated task to underpin the inference from diminished capacities to reduced sentences of socially deprived offenders.