Criminal Responsibility and Fair Moral Opportunity

It is often thought that an agent is blameworthy only for wrongdoing she had a fair opportunity to avoid. However, in this article, I defend the thesis that there is a form of culpability for wrongdoing-exemplified by criminal guilt-that it is possible to accrue even for wrongdoing one lacked a fair opportunity to avoid. If I am right that criminal guilt, properly conceived, is not something everyone necessarily has a fair opportunity to avoid, an offender's lack of fair opportunity to avoid her guilt would appear to be an important potential ground for mitigation at sentencing. Hence, the thesis of this article may point the way toward a novel explanation of a moral intuition that a coterie of moral, political, and legal theorists has for decades sought but struggled to vindicate: the intuition that offenders who have suffered from various social disadvantages should receive less punishment for their crimes, even when those crimes are not morally justified or excused.