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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2009
Does a woman's being repeatedly battered by her husband excuse her killing him while he was asleep? This and similar questions are often dealt with by asking a more general question, “Should we accept abuse excuses?” These questions engender a lot of heat, but little light, in the media and other public forums, and even in the writings of many theorists. They have been discussed as if there is a typical abuse excuse we can examine in order to examine abuse excuses in general. Similarly, the question of whether we should accept abuse excuses has often been discussed as if it is simple and straightforward. But there is no one typical abuse excuse, and the question of whether to accept such excuses is neither simple nor straightforward. There are many different abuse excuses, many different circumstances in which they are deployed, and many different sorts of concerns motivating their use. In this, abuse excuses are just like other, well-accepted excuses, such as self-defense.
1 Dershowitz, Alan, The Abuse Excuse and Other Cop-Outs, Sob Stories, and Evasions of Responsibility (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1994)Google Scholar is not the most egregious of the works which purport to show this, but it is a good place to start. Moreover, it provides a useful list of new excuses that Dershowitz and many others find so objectionable. A good source on the complexities of abuse excuses and similar excuses is the symposium in the Spring 1996 issue, volume 57, of the University of Pittsburgh Law Review.
2 Wilson, James Q., Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? (New York: Basic Books, 1997).Google Scholar
3 The first quote is from ibid., 3, the second from ibid., 23–24. (Insofar as clarity allows, page references will henceforth be given in the text.) The internal notes are Wilson's. Note iii refers to Dershowitz, , The Abuse Excuse, 321–41Google Scholar. I will follow Wilson in, perhaps mislead-ingly, calling all these new, controversial excuses, abuse excuses, even though only some have to do with abuse.
Note iv refers to Delgado, Richard, “‘Rotten Social Background’: Should the Criminal Law Recognize a Defense of Severe Environmental Deprivation?” Law and Inequality Journal 3 (1985): 9Google Scholar; and to Bazelon, David L., “The Morality of the Criminal Law,” Southern California Law Review 49 (1976): 385Google Scholar. These two essays are reprinted in Justification and Excuse in the Criminal Law, ed. Corrado, Michael Louis (New York: Garland, 1994)Google Scholar. Bazelon's article is discussed briefly below.
4 On learned helplessness, see Walker, Lenore, Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)Google Scholar. Other references can be found in Downs, Donald Alexander, More Than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).Google Scholar
5 For self-respect and justice considerations, see Zipursky, Benjamin, “Self-Defense, Dom ination, and the Social Contract,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 57 (1996): 579.Google Scholar
6 See Rosen, Richard A., “On Self-Defense, Imminence, and Women Who Kill Their Batterers,” North Carolina Law Review 71 (1993): 371.Google Scholar
7 For harmful conflations and omissions of this sort, see Showalter, Elaine, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Downs holds that (many of) those who link learned helplessness and the battered-woman syn drome make this error by not discussing other outcomes of the syndrome and what led to it. But from what he writes, it is unclear whether they hold that learned helplessness is the only outcome, or whether, for other reasons, they focus only on that outcome. Downs, himself, comes close to making this error. As one of his central criticisms of explanations of behavior in terms of learned helplessness, he writes that battering is often accompanied by “heightened reason with which the battered women perceive impending danger” (More Than Victims, 5)Google Scholar. But he does not show how the outcome of heightened reason in some battered women tells against learned helplessness being an outcome in some other battered women. (Downs here cites Blackman, Julie, “Potential Uses for Expert Testimony: Ideas toward the Representation of Battered Women Who Kill,” Women's Rights Law Reporter 9 [1986]: 231Google Scholar. Downs also cites Blackman, , Intimate Violence: A Study of Injustice [New York: Columbia University Press, 1989].)Google Scholar
8 Downs, , More Than Victims, 8Google Scholar, citing Allard, Sharon Angella, “Rethinking Battered Woman Syndrome: A Black Feminist Perspective,” UCLA Women's Law Journal 1 (1991): 193–94, 206Google Scholar, which in turn quotes Sagaw, Shirley, “A Hard Case for Feminists: People v. Goetz,” Harvard Women's Law Journal 10 (1987): 256 n. 21Google Scholar. See also Ritchie, Beth, Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1996).Google Scholar
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13 West, Cornel, Race Matters (New York: Vintage Press, 1994).Google Scholar
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16 This is described in Gaylin, Willard, The Killing of Bonnie Garland (New York: Penguin, 1983).Google Scholar
17 Berman, Paul, “The Other and the Almost the Same,” New Yorker 70 (02 28, 1994): 62.Google Scholar
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21 For Aristotle, , see Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, chs. 1–5Google Scholar, especially ch. 2. See also Sherman, Nancy, The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Meyer, Susan Sauvé, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).Google Scholar
22 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, ch. 1.Google Scholar
23 See, for example, ibid., Book III.
24 My thanks are owed to Alvin Goldman for raising this latter point.
25 See, e.g., Care, Norman, Living with One's Past: Personal Fate and Moral Pain (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).Google Scholar
26 On these points, see Stacker, and Hegeman, , Valuing Emotions.Google Scholar
27 On these issues, see Goldman, Alvin, “Epistemic Paternalism: Communication Control in Law and Society,” The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 113–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 I have been helped here by Arenella's discussion of Strawson, , in “Convicting the Morally Blameless,” 1535–44.Google Scholar
29 Bellas, Christopher and Sundelson, David, The New Informants: The Betrayal of Confidentiality in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), 80–82.Google Scholar
30 My thanks are owed here to Judge Angela Karpin of the District Court, New South Wales, Australia.
