”Provocation and the Mitigation of Responsibility”

In this article I discuss the relationship between the victim’s and the perpetrator’s guilt in a rape situation. Does recognition of the victim’s guilt automatically remove (any) responsibility from the perpetrator? One way of arguing that is does is to lean on an expanded version of the principle that “ought implies can”, which implies that the magnitude of the difficulty involved in abstaining from a certain action will affect the agent’s responsibility for it. This idea is firmly established in both common sense and moral practice, but I believe that it rests on the mistaken view that can is a gradable concept. Can is, I think, vague but categorical. This means that even if (and I say if) the perpetrator were provoked to some degree by his victim, this would not annul his responsibility so far as the expanded version of the principle is concerned.