Abstract

DEL CORRAL, Miranda. Excuses and exemptions. Tópicos (México) [online]. 2015, n.49, pp.231-256. ISSN 0188-6649.

Excuses and exempting conditions aim to mitigate responsibility. This paper proposes a distinction between excuses and exemptions in terms of the distinctive kind of judgement each of them aims to respond. I argue that exemptions affect the explanatory relevance of the accused, while excuses fully or partially justify her, by affecting the evaluative claim involved in responsibility attributions. This distinction supports the claim that attributing responsibility is a two-step process, each of them corresponding to a different kind of responsibility-agential and moral-whose attribution is guided by two different although related cognitive and argumentative tasks: explaining an outcome, and evaluating its moral significance.

Keywords : moral responsibility; explanatory judgements; excuses; exempting conditions.

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