A PLEA FOR EXCUSES

a brief debate about moral wrong, blame, and excuses after John L. Austin

Abstract

My aim in the essay is to present three approaches in the relationship among moral wrong, blame, and excuses. The starting point is to analyze the contributions by John L. Austin about the subject and to clarify other approaches about excuses in dialogue with Austin’s account. To achieve my aim, the paper will follow this structure: I begin showing John Austin’s arguments about wrong, blame, and excuses, presented in his article “A Plea for Excuses” (1957). In general, he shows that an excuse makes unfair to blame the agent for his moral wrong, but his moral wrong remains. After that, I analyze Eduardo Rivera-López’s arguments about excuses, which has a different approach comparing to Austin. He defends the following account: if the agent has an excuse, he did not commit any moral wrong at all, no blame allowed. In the last author, I present R. Jay Wallace who also contradicts Austin. He defends an approach with similar implications as those shown by Rivera-López: if the agent has an excuse for violating a moral demand, then he did not violate any moral demand, no blame allowed. By the end of the article, the reader will be able to assess how fruitful and current are Austin’s pretensions regarding a study about excuses.