Review of Mark Dsouza’s Rationale-Based Defences in Criminal Law

Abstract

Mark Dsouza’s new book, Rationale-Based Defences in Criminal Law, aims to shed new light on the question of how to conceptualize justifications and excuses as defenses against criminal liability. His offers an alternative to the common account on which justifications negate the wrongness of acts whereas excuses negate only the actor’s blameworthiness but not the act’s wrongness. Instead, Dsouza contends that the justification–excuse distinction is entirely a matter of the quality of the defendant’s reasoning. His account of justifications is generally compelling, although his accounts of excuses and of the moral norms underlying the criminal law are less persuasive. Overall, however, Dsouza successfully establishes his quality-of-reasoning view as a viable competitor theory of justifications and excuses.