J Value Inquiry (2009) 43:391–413

DOI 10.1007/s10790-009-9180-x

Poverty and Criminal Responsibility

Victor Tadros

Published online: 23 September 2009

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Let us suppose that the following two things are true of a particular society, as they
probably are of many societies. One is that poor people in the society are poor as a
consequence of distributive injustice. Were we to distribute wealth adequately, they
would be better off than they are. The other is that the fact that they are poorer than
they ought to be makes them more likely to commit criminal offences. Poverty is what
we might call criminogenic: it tends to increase the crime rate. This might be true of
poverty in itself, or it might only be true of poverty in circumstances of inequality, or
unjust inequality. For our purposes, it does not matter very much what makes it unjust
that the poor are as poor as they are. It only matters, whatever the right view about
justice and wealth, that they are worse off than they ought to be, and that this is
criminogenic. It also does not matter much why poverty is criminogenic. We need
only assume that the state has responsibility for reducing criminogenic social
conditions and that, by perpetuating economic injustice, it has failed adequately to
achieve this.
To what extent can these two things undermine the entitlement of the society to
hold poor individuals criminally responsible for what they do? One possibility is
that some poor people in such conditions might not be responsible agents at all. We
might not be able to hold them responsible for what they do because they lack the
basic cognitive, moral and volitional capacities that are required to be regarded as
responsible people in general. That might be because they lack education or other
important opportunities for socialization. If that is true they lack what may be called
‘‘status responsibility.’’1 Their lack of status responsibility entitles them to an
exemption from criminal responsibility.

1
Victor Tadros, Criminal Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ch. 5.

V. Tadros (&)
School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
e-mail: V.Tadros@warwick.ac.uk

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Where should we draw the line between people who are status responsible and
people who are not? In deciding that persons lack status responsibility, we decide
that they lack the capacities that are required for full moral interpersonal relations.
The interpersonal relationships are grounded in our capacities to address each other
in terms of moral and political norms that all can be expected to endorse and
respect. They ground not only our social interactions with each other, but also our
political relationships. To decide that a person lacks status responsibility is to decide
that he is to be excluded from the normal set of social and political relations that we
have with each other.
There are some people for whom such a decision is the right one. There are
people who we cannot address in terms of our moral and political norms in the
normal way because we cannot expect them to understand and act on the norms.
But we should be wary of deciding that this is the case. Insofar as possible, we
should seek to include others in our ordinary social and political relationships. We
should err on the side of treating others as status responsible because in failing to
do so we deny them something that is of very basic value to human beings: the full
range of rights and obligations that go with reciprocal moral and political relations.
For this reason, we should treat inadequate provision of education and opportu-
nities for socialization as undermining status responsibility only in the most
extreme cases.
Another possibility is that some poor people are justified in committing some of
the crimes that they commit. In extremis, poor people may be justified in taking
food from others in order to prevent themselves from starving. They may well be
justified in doing more than that. They may be entitled to take goods from other
people who have more than their fair share of wealth. By doing so, they may move
the distribution of wealth in the direction of justice, and they may be at least entitled
to do that. If that is true, while they are responsible for stealing, they are entitled to a
justification defense, and hence they are not criminally responsible for what they
have done.
Some people might doubt that a general strategy of permitting poor people to
take goods from the rich will move the distribution of wealth in the direction of
justice. That might or might not be good enough reason to restrict the provision of a
justification defense to the poor for theft from the rich. At any rate, the impact on
criminal responsibility of this kind of justification is still limited. It only applies to
people who have less than their fair share of wealth who take goods from people
who have more than their fair share of wealth. It does nothing to address the
question of whether we can hold poor people responsible for their crimes in general
where the state, in our name, has treated them unjustly in economic terms.
Here is another alternative. We might distinguish between our right to blame
people for what they do and the extent to which they must shoulder the burdens for
what they do. It might be argued that we are entitled to blame the poor for what they
do. It is sufficient for that purpose that what they do reflects their judgments. But
even if that is so, there might be reasons why we should be cautious about imposing
burdens on them as a consequence of those judgments, since they have had a less
valuable range of choices available to them. We have good reason to prefer that
the burdens that we suffer are sensitive to the choices that we are provided with.

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They have reason to prefer having had a better range of choices, and the burdens
that people suffer should be sensitive to that range of choices.2
On this approach, the fact that we are responsible for restricting the choices of the
poor might make a difference to the distribution of burdens. We cannot reject a
principle requiring us to shoulder an increased proportion of those burdens, it might
be argued, because they come about as a result of our decisions to restrict the
opportunities available to the poor. However, this account does nothing to erode our
right to blame the poor for the crimes they commit, only to restrict the extent to
which they can be punished for committing the crimes.
Our question is whether we ought to withhold blame from victims of injustice for
the crimes they commit. Our right to blame them, it might be argued, is eroded by
the fact that we perpetrated the injustice. By perpetrating distributive injustice
against the poor, we might lose standing to hold them responsible for what they
have done. That may be true even if they are responsible for what they have done.
There are different explanations of how our standing to hold others responsible may
be eroded, but two are most important. One is grounded in hypocrisy: the fact that
one person commits the same kinds of wrong as someone else deprives the one of
standing to hold the other person responsible for his wrongs. The other explanation
is complicity: the fact that one person participates in the wrong of someone else
deprives the one of standing to hold the other person responsible for the wrong.
A person cannot act as judge when he ought to be a co-defendant. The argument
from complicity is more powerful than the argument from hypocrisy.
Where the two features of a society described above obtain, we should regard the
state as complicit in the crimes of the poor. From this we can derive a moral claim
that poor people have for the state to refrain from holding them responsible for their
crimes, even if they are in fact responsible for them.3 In recognizing this, we do not
undermine our recognition that they are status responsible. Nor do we not regard
their actions as either justified or excused. There may be someone who can hold
them responsible for what they have done. But the person who can do this is not the
author of the circumstances that make their wrongdoing more likely to occur. In
holding them criminally responsible, we perpetrate a kind of injustice against them.
Failing to hold the poor responsible for the crimes that they commit may,
however, constitute another kind of injustice. For one thing, we might fail to provide
an adequate public response to a wrong that has been done to the victim, and the
victim might have a special kind of interest in there being such a public response.
Furthermore, failing to hold poor criminals responsible for their crimes might
further erode the security of the poor. The poor, by being victims of distributive
injustice, are already worse off than they ought to be in security terms. One reason
for this is that wealth provides us with opportunities to make ourselves more secure.

2
See Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1998) ch. 6, esp. pp. 290–294.
3
See R. A. Duff, ‘‘Principle and Contradiction in the Criminal Law: Motives and Criminal Liability,’’ in
Philosophy and the Criminal Law: Principle and Critique (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), and Duff ‘‘‘I Might Be Guilty, But You Can’t Try Me’: Estoppel and Other Bars to Trial,’’ 1
Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law (2003); see also G. A. Cohen, ‘‘Casting the First Stone: Who Can,
and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?’’, 81 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements (2006).

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Therefore, in failing to hold the poor responsible for their crimes, we might
compound the injustice done to the poor.
Ultimately, then, under persistent conditions of economic injustice, economic
injustice is, in one way or another, compounded by criminal injustice. Either there is
the injustice of holding the poor responsible for their crimes where our justification
for doing so is eroded by our complicity in their crimes. Alternatively, there is the
injustice of failing to hold them responsible for their crimes. This involves the
injustice of failing to provide the victims of crime with adequate public recognition
that a wrong has been done to them and the injustice of compounding the already
unjust insecurity of the poor.

1 Eroding the Entitlement to Hold Others Responsible

The account we will consider rests on a distinction between the conditions which
make a person responsible for something and the justifications for holding the
person responsible for the thing at issue. It is one thing to say about a person that she
is responsible for the action that she performs. It is another thing to say that we are
entitled to hold her responsible for her actions. To be justified in holding people
responsible for their actions it must be true that they are responsible for their
actions, but that is not sufficient.
One reason why it may not be sufficient has to do with what we might call
standing. A person may be responsible for some action which we lack standing to
hold her responsible for performing. We can often usefully ask whether one person
is responsible to another person for performing a particular action. In asking that, we
ask whether the other person has standing to hold the one responsible for performing
the action. Let us consider, for example, some foolish action that a person performs
in the course of his employment which harms his employer’s reputation. His
employer has standing to hold him responsible for that action. But if another
employer, or another private citizen, attempts to hold him responsible for that
action, he is entitled to say that it is none of his business.4 That is not to say that
other people cannot treat him as responsible. Other employers might refuse to hire
him on this basis. In saying that they may not hold him responsible, we indicate that
they are not entitled to engage him in practices of responsibility.
In this case, we can say that it is only a person’s employer that has standing to
hold him responsible for his failures as an employee, because he is responsible to his
employer for his conduct as an employee. This kind of claim is not relevant here
though. The state in principle has standing to hold its citizens and visitors
responsible for the crimes they commit. We might even argue that it has standing of
a special kind. Here is a plausible explanation why.5 What distinguishes a crime
4
Cf. R. A. Duff, Answering for Crime (Oxford: Hart, 2007), pp. 23–30; see also Tadros, op. cit., ch. 1.
5
See S. E. Marshall and R. A. Duff, ‘‘Criminalization and Sharing Wrongs,’’ 11 Canadian Journal of
Law and Jurisprudence (1998); see also R. A. Duff, Punishment, Communication and Community
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); R. A. Duff, L. Farmer, S. E. Marshall and V. Tadros, The Trial
on Trial Case 3: Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial (Oxford: Hart, 2007); and R. A. Duff,
Answering for Crime.

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from a private wrong is that a crime is the kind of wrong which citizens must answer
to other citizens for committing, and they must answer not only qua private
individual but qua citizen. If that is true, we can conceive of crimes as wrongs that
violate the conditions of citizenship. In violating the conditions of citizenship the
offender properly attracts public condemnation. The criminal trial provides a forum
within which people who commit crimes can be held responsible by the public, as
represented by the state.
It must be noted that we are concerned with crimes in the normative sense rather
than the descriptive sense. There are many things that are crimes on the statute
books which do not fulfill this normative conception of a crime. The normative idea
of a crime, it is suggested, is that crimes are wrongs which the state has standing to
hold citizens responsible for committing. This provides the outline of an argument
against criminalizing some wrongs. If we suppose that adultery is at least sometimes
wrong, why should the state not criminalize it? A skeleton of an answer is that
adultery is not the sort of thing that the state ought to hold citizens responsible for.
Adultery may be wrong, but it is not a public wrong. It is not the kind of wrong that
citizens are entitled to hold each other responsible for qua citizens.
We require flesh to put on these bones. We must consider what kinds of wrong
violate conditions of citizenship, and hence a political theory with citizenship at its
core sits in the background of the normative theory of crime. Without making any
further progress on that, we can already see that the state in principle has standing to
call individuals to account for their criminal actions. That fact is what distinguishes
crimes from other kinds of wrong. If the state in principle lacks standing to hold
citizens responsible for a particular kind of conduct, the conduct should not be a
crime at all.
We may assume, then, that we are concerned with genuine crimes that are
committed by the poor, wrongs that the state in principle has standing to hold others
responsible for committing as citizens. Here we are interested in a different aspect
of standing. If we suppose that one person in principle has standing to hold another
person responsible for performing some action, why might he not be entitled to do
so in this particular case? We might distinguish between relational and non-
relational reasons why not. Non-relational reasons have to do with things that are
specific either to of the persons which provide reasons against the first holding the
second responsible in this case. Relational reasons have to do with special features
about the relationship between the two persons either in general, or with respect to
the act in particular. While the first person might in principle be entitled to hold the
second responsible for his action, it might be that the relationship between them is
defective either in general or with respect to the action in particular.
There are various non-relational reasons that might have significance for the
question of standing. For example, there may be reasons of mercy. Given other
things that a person has suffered it may be wrong for us to hold him responsible for a
wrong that he has done us, given that we know that this will make him suffer further
pain. Alternatively, it may be that we are incapable of participating adequately in a
practice of responsibility. Even though someone was a responsible agent at the time
that she wronged another person, she might now be incapable of understanding the
norms that applied to her then.

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Neither of these explanations has much importance in this context. More

important is a concern with hypocrisy. The idea here is that one person ought not to
criticize another person for a particular action if the first regularly flouts the
standards that he would hold the other person to himself, or at least he ought not to
do so if he is unrepentant. Hypocrisy can sometimes rest on a person’s propensity to
commit wrongs of a similar or greater magnitude of seriousness. Rapists and
murderers ought not to hold thieves responsible for stealing. It is especially
problematic when an accuser has a tendency to commit wrongs of the same kind.
Thieves have a special reason not to hold other thieves responsible for stealing, a
reason that is stronger than that which applies to reckless drivers, even if reckless
driving and theft are wrongs of a similar magnitude.
The moral significance of hypocrisy has to do with the way in which hypocrites
imply that they are exempt from the moral standards that they apply to the people
they accuse. There are two potential faults here that have a common root. One
concerns the original standards of conduct; the other the standards of accountability.
Let us suppose that Melanie has performed a wrong which another person regularly
perpetrates. In criticizing the actions of the other person in these circumstances,
Melanie may imply that the reasons against the action apply to him but not to her.
However, it may be that not all claims of hypocrisy are like this. Perhaps the
hypocrite is simply being irrational or walling herself off from making obvious
inferences from her judgments because it is uncomfortable to do this.6 A similar
concern to the one expressed above applies in that case. The hypocrite implies that
the accused person is obliged submit to critical scrutiny of his conduct while
denying that she has a similar obligation in morally similar circumstances. Whether
it is the original obligation not to perform the wrongful action, or the new obligation
to submit herself to critical scrutiny in a relationship of responsibility, in being
hypocritical, Melanie implies that different moral standards apply to her than she
regards as applying to the accused person.
These things are faults because the very idea of a reason for action is neutral
between agents. In recognizing that there is a reason not to perform some act, we
must accept that the reason moves rational agents who set ends for themselves. Thus
each person must accept that in principle that reason applies to others as well,
insofar as they are rational agents. The converse is also true. In claiming that we
have a reason not to do something, others must accept that rational agents must treat
that as a reason not to do the thing at issue. If we are each to see ourselves as
rational agents who are subject to reasons, we must also see that the very same
reason applies to us. Reasons for action, by their nature, create a basic symmetry
between agents. In seeing us as being required to act for a reason, others must see
themselves as moved by the same reason, and through that they recognize a basic
symmetry between themselves and others: we can all be held to account in the court
of reason.
When a person criticizes another person for some action that the critic himself
performs, he implies that he and the person he criticizes stand differently in the

6
See Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990),
pp. 25–26.

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court of reason, either with respect to the action or with respect to the obligation to
submit to being held to account for it. Hence, it is wrong for him to criticize the
other person because it is wrong to imply that he is not subject to the same reasons
as the other person and that for some special reason he is excluded from being held
responsible for the action where the other person is. The hypocrite denies that he
and others whom he criticizes have the same status as moral agents who are subject
to the reason, and he ought not to deny that.
There are circumstances in which there really is a reason for one person to refrain
from an action where the reason does not apply to others. For example, it may be
wrong for others to discipline a particular child but not wrong for the child’s parent
to do so. There is no problem of hypocrisy in the parent criticizing another person
for disciplining his child, even if he commonly does the same thing. In this case,
there is something special about the parent with respect to the court of reasons that
does not apply to others. This is shown by the fact that the parent recognizes that at
a more general level there is parity with respect to the reasons that apply to
everyone. Just as it is wrong for other people to discipline his children, so it is wrong
for him to discipline theirs.
Relational reasons for someone not to hold another person responsible for the
wrong that he has done are grounded in particular defects that his relationship with
the person might have either in general or with respect to the particular action. Let
us suppose, for example, that Melanie has done a more serious wrong to Neil in the
past than the one that she is accusing him of. In that case she might be accused of
hypocrisy. She is accusing him of wrongdoing when she is a wrongdoer herself. The
non-relational reasons for her not to hold him responsible for what he has done
apply in this case as well.
But the charge is more powerful than that. We start from a position where we
have an obligation to others to enter into reciprocal relationships of responsibility
with them, at least with respect to some kinds of wrong. Normally, we are entitled to
hold each other responsible for some of the wrongs that we commit, simply as
human beings. However, when one person commits a wrong against another, he
gives her a reason not to engage in those ordinary relationships of responsibility.
When he wrongs her, she is entitled to distance herself from him, and hence to deny
the obligation to enter into future relationships of responsibility with him. She can
accept that she has done wrong to him, and that victims of wrongs are normally
entitled to hold wrongdoers responsible for wrongs of this kind. But she denies that
he can hold her responsible for the wrong, on the grounds that this entitlement is
conditional. It is eroded by the wrong that he has previously done to her.
The reason why this might be so is that practices of responsibility ought to be
conducted by showing adequate concern for each other as human beings. When a
person holds another person responsible for a wrong that she has committed, she is
entitled to expect that he has proper concern for her as a human being, that in
holding her responsible he will not treat her unjustly by punishing her dispropor-
tionately, or by denying her an adequate opportunity to provide an explanation of
why she did what she did. Insofar as she has been treated unjustly by him, since she
has no reason to expect that this will be the case, she has a right to distance herself
from him.

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In this explanation, the reason to deny that one person is entitled to hold another
responsible for the wrong that she has committed does not pick out the wrong that
she has performed in particular. It is grounded in the erosion of the relationship
between herself and the other person in general. The poor might be entitled to claim
something like this. As victims of injustice, since they have been treated wrongly,
they are entitled to distance themselves from relations of responsibility with the
state.
But their claim is still stronger than this. It is grounded in the responsibility of the
state for the performance of this criminal action in particular. If one person bears
moral responsibility for another person’s performance of this particular action, the
first has a further reason not to hold the other person responsible for it. This kind of
relationship is the relationship of complicity. The following is an account of the
moral idea of complicity rather than complicity in the law, though it will draw on
some examples that have legal significance.
In cases of complicity there is a principal, who performs a wrongful action, and a
complicit agent, who has a relationship of one kind or another with the action by the
principal. There are different ways in which a person might become complicit and
different degrees of fault for complicity. Complicity has what lawyers call actus
reus and mens rea dimensions. Each dimension can affect the seriousness of a
person’s complicity overall. The seriousness of complicity is sensitive to the degree
of involvement and to the mental state of the wrongdoer.
One very serious way of being complicit in a wrong is to orchestrate it. Smith
hires a hit-man to shoot Jones. In that case, the hit-man plays a role in Smith’s plan
to have Jones shot. Less serious are cases where a person participates in someone
else’ plan to commit a wrong. For example Smith might encourage Jones to
perform the wrong without orchestrating it, or he might provide him with advice
about how to commit the wrong. Smith might provide Jones with material
assistance to do the wrong, for example if Smith provides the hit-man with the gun
to shoot Jones. Assistance might be less direct than that though, as where Smith
provides the hit-man with the means to get away from the scene of the crime, or
with a place to hide Jones’s body. Finally, Smith might contribute to the conditions
which make wrongdoing of this kind more likely, where he does not participate in a
plan to do wrong at all. Smith publishes a directory of hit-men which assists
gangland bosses in finding the hit-man of their choice. The gangland boss finds the
hit-man through the directory. Smith has a kind of complicity in his shooting his
victim.
Agents who are complicit in the wrongful acts of others might have different
degrees of fault for the wrongful assistance they provide. We will focus on
complicit agents who provide assistance to the principal agent. Let us suppose that
Smith provides a hit-man with a gun to shoot Jones. He might do so intending that
he will use it to shoot Jones, or he might do so knowing but not intending that he
will shoot Jones. He might give him the gun taking a risk that he will shoot Jones, or
thinking that he will use it on a firing range, but where he ought to know that he will
shoot Jones. Finally, Smith might give him the gun, complying with the relevant just
laws and where he has no reason to believe that he will use it for anything but
innocent purposes. We might say about these cases, a little crudely, that Smith is

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respectively intentionally complicit, knowingly complicit, recklessly complicit,

negligently complicit and innocently complicit.7
We might deny that innocent complicity should be called a kind of complicity at
all. Complicity, it might be argued, should require some degree of fault. But there is
something to be said for the idea of innocent complicity. Let us suppose that Smith
runs a gun shop. Jones comes in to buy a gun. Smith abides by his moral and legal
obligations in selling Jones the gun. Jones then uses it to shoot someone. Smith
nevertheless bears a kind of strict responsibility for the shooting. Had he known, he
thinks to himself, he ought not to have done that.8 Even if Smith can appropriately
consider himself as justified in selling Jones the gun, he nevertheless ought to regret
having done so; not to regret having made the decision under the epistemic
conditions he was in, but to regret that he acted in a way that was wrong, even
though he was not in an epistemic position to know that it was wrong.9
Let us consider a person’s entitlement to hold the wrongdoer responsible for what
he has done in cases of complicity. One thing to note here is that the complicit
person’s entitlement is affected only if she is in some way at fault for the occurrence
of the wrongful conduct. It is not sufficient that she is innocently complicit. If a
person innocently sells a principal a gun and he shoots someone, he cannot deny, on
the grounds that she provided him with the gun, that she is entitled to hold him
responsible for the shooting. Complicity must be wrongful in some way for it to
erode the grounds of her entitlement to hold him responsible for what he has done.
That does not matter too much in this context, though, as it is common knowledge
that the poverty created by injustice is criminogenic. Even if it is not common
knowledge, our political representatives ought to know that. Furthermore, this is one
of the reasons against perpetrating distributive injustice.
The greater the fault of the complicit agent, the greater the extent to which his
entitlement is eroded. Let us suppose that Smith provides the hit-man with the gun,
intending that he shoot Jones with it. Smith cannot then hold him responsible for
shooting Jones with it. ‘‘I did just what you intended me to do with it,’’ he might
respond. However, if Smith is merely negligent this kind of claim is much weaker.
Let us suppose that Smith negligently sells the hit-man the gun, and finding out that
he has shot Jones with it, Smith attempts to hold the hit-man responsible for it. ‘‘You
should have thought about what I was going to do with it when you sold me the
gun,’’ he replies. But that does not provide very strong grounds for the hit-man to
claim that Smith is not entitled to hold him responsible for his conduct. The weaker
the person’s fault, the less responsibility he bears for the principal’s conduct. The
less responsibility he bears for the principal’s conduct, the greater his entitlement to
hold the principal responsible for what he has done.
Cases of complicity are distinct from cases of hypocrisy in the following sense.
In cases of hypocrisy, one person’s entitlement to hold another responsible for his
wrongdoing is eroded because the one person must regard himself subject to the

7
See Tadros, op. cit., ch. 9.
8
See ibid., ch. 10; see also Thomson op. cit, pp. 172–173.
9
See Victor Tadros, ‘‘The Scope and the Grounds of Responsibility,’’ New Criminal Law Review (2008);
see also Thomson op. cit., pp. 172–173.

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same reasons for action as the other. In cases of complicity, it is eroded because a
person must regard himself as responsible, to some degree or other, for the other
person’s wrongful action. The paradox in hypocritical accusation is that the
criticizing agent claims that the other person ought to have been moved by a reason
while implying that the he need not be moved by that reason, despite the lack of a
morally significant difference between them. The paradox in accusations for things
that a person is complicit in is that the complicit person claims to be entitled to hold
the principal responsible for something that he is responsible for. The complicit
person claims to sit as a judge in the case, to use a legal metaphor, where he should
be regarded as co-defendant.

2 The Value of Practices of Responsibility

We have so far suggested two ways in which one person might lose standing to hold
another responsible for what he does. We have also suggested, without arguing for
it, that cases of complicity are more powerful than cases of hypocrisy. Having
responsibility for the action under consideration creates a stronger reason to refrain
from holding another person responsible for what he did than the fact that we would
be hypocritical in doing so. This is at least intuitively plausible. But it might be
wondered whether there is any good foundation for these intuitions. There are two
objections to consider, and the response to the second is tied to the response to the
first. The first objection is very general. It has to do with the extent to which the
position being advocated here advocates that wrongdoers compound their wrong-
doing with further wrongs. The second is more specific. It calls into question why
standing should be more powerfully eroded in cases of complicity compared with
cases of hypocrisy.
Here is the first objection.10 Let us suppose, as is plausible, that it is valuable for
people to be held responsible for the wrongs they perpetrate. Were it not for a
person’s own prior wrongdoing, there would be good reason for him to hold others
responsible for the wrong that they have perpetrated; something which is true of the
state with respect to criminal wrongdoing. However, as he has committed a prior
wrong, either by performing a similar kind of wrong himself or by being complicit
in the other person’s wrong, he regards himself as lacking standing and hence
refrains from holding the other person responsible for what he has done. But here
the wrongdoer seems simply to compound his earlier wrongdoing by refraining from
doing a valuable thing in holding the other person responsible. How could that be
so?
Up to this point, we have treated hypocrisy and complicity as providing a bar on
holding others responsible. But this is not entirely right. Given that both people have
done wrong, what each ideally ought to do is both to hold the other person
responsible for what he has done and at the same time to hold himself responsible
for his own wrongdoing. He ought to enter into relations of responsibility with the
other wrongdoer but at the same time to treat himself as an object of self-criticism.

10
Thanks are due to Andrew Williams on this matter.

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The wrong is in entering into a practice of responsibility with the other person while
at the same time blocking the attribution of responsibility to himself.
Let us suppose that is what the wrongdoer does. He holds the other person
responsible for what he has done without allowing himself to be subject to
appropriate criticism either for wrongdoing of that kind or for his complicity in the
wrong. He has behaved in a non-ideal way. He has fulfilled one of his obligations:
his obligation to hold the other responsible for what he has done. But, the objector
suggests, this is still closer to the ideal than failing to hold the other person
responsible for what he has done at all. In failing to hold the other person
responsible at all, he has both perpetrated a wrong and failed to hold the other
person responsible for what he has done. How can it possibly be preferable to
compound his earlier wrong by failing in yet a further way to behave in the morally
ideal manner? Yet that is what arguments about standing seem to require.
The first thing to do is to explore further the important point that standing can be
repaired by entering into a practice of responsibility where we subject ourselves to
criticism at the same time as subjecting others to it. Let us suppose that Sally is
complicit in Ted’s wrong and she later comes to recognize that she and Ted are both
responsible for the wrong. She therefore holds herself responsible for her role. In
subjecting herself to criticism, she helps to foster the expectation that she will now
take wrongdoing seriously. If that is right, Ted can also hold both himself and Sally
responsible for his wrongdoing, subjecting himself and Sally to criticism for what
they both have done. In fact, not only can she do so, she plausibly has a duty to do so.
Complicit wrongdoers ought to hold both themselves and the principal wrongdoer
responsible for what they have done. In entering into such a practice Sally does not
imply that the reasons that Ted ought to have complied with do not apply to her. She
makes it explicit that she is subject to the same court of reasons as Ted. This is akin
to a group form of self-criticism. In this case, the relationship of responsibility is
properly reciprocal. In holding Ted responsible for what he has done, Sally accepts
the demand that she ought to be held responsible for what she has done.
This relational aspect is central to the value of practices of responsibility. The
value of practices of responsibility is that they help us to repair our relationships
where, through our wrongdoing, we have violated the moral principles that ought to
govern the relationships. This is so because the moral principles that govern our
relationships with each other arise from the fact of our mutual moral status as
normatively governed agents. In violating the principles, we also implicitly fail to
treat the person we wrong as a moral agent of equal and great moral concern.
Practices of responsibility are to be entered into in order to communicate to
wrongdoers the moral principles that they ought to be governed by, and through that
to ensure that they come to fully recognize the moral status of their fellow human
beings and to ensure that their actions are guided appropriately. Only then can we
live together with the expectation that our future relations will be governed by
principles of mutual respect.
From this, we can see the injustice involved in defective practices of responsibility,
for example in practices involving hypocrisy or complicity. The value of practices of
responsibility is to repair our relationships by helping to ensure that we fully
recognize our equal and great moral significance as normatively governed agents.

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But if the accuser is being hypocritical or is complicit in the wrongdoing, he fails to

recognize that he has equal moral status to the accused, such that they are both to be
governed by the set of moral principles that are derived from our status. Let us
suppose that Sally accuses Ted of wrongdoing that she is complicit in performing,
but at the same time denies her involvement. She attempts to foster in Ted his
obligation to abide by a moral principle, to be grounded in his recognition that we, as
human beings, have equal moral status. But she does so while denying that he has
the right to address her on that basis. Hence, she fails to treat Ted with the respect
that he is due as a moral agent by denying his equal moral status, and in that way she
perpetrates an injustice against him.
Returning to the initial objection, let us suppose that Ted has wronged someone,
who is thus the victim, and Sally is complicit in the wrong. We may compare three
things that then happen. In the first case, Sally holds Ted responsible for the
wrongdoing and at the same time holds herself responsible. In the second case, Sally
holds Ted responsible for the wrongdoing and refuses herself to be held responsible
for it. In the third case, Sally refrains from holding Ted responsible for wrongdoing
to avoid being held responsible herself. The first case is the ideal, for the reasons
explored above. But the third case may be preferable to the second. We may well
ask how this can be. In the second case, one person is held responsible for his
wrongdoing, whereas in the third, no one is. If it is valuable to hold people
responsible for what they have done, we should value the fact that at least one
person is held responsible. That is closer to the ideal of both being held responsible
for what they have done in the first case.
One answer is that there is intrinsic disvalue in the practice of responsibility in
the second case that might sometimes outweigh the value of Ted being held
responsible for what he has done. The intrinsic disvalue is in the wrong that another
person does to Ted in the practice itself, through which Sally denies Ted’s equal
moral status. It may still be something of positive value that Ted is held responsible
for what he has done, but it is something of negative value that this is done by
perpetrating an injustice on Ted. The wrong done to Ted by implying his lack of
moral status when compared with another person may be more significant than the
value of holding him responsible for what he has done. That is at least plausible
when the wrong that he has committed is not very serious.
The objection might be pressed further, however. Let us compare again the
second and third cases. In the third case there is no relationship of responsibility
whereas in the second case there is a defective relationship of responsibility. Why
should we think that no relationship of responsibility is preferable to a defective
relationship? After all, in the third case we may both continue to fail to recognize
the principles that ought to govern our relations with our fellow human beings, and
hence to recognize their equal status. We may wonder if our failure to engage in a
practice of responsibility does not perpetrate an injustice against our fellow human
beings through a double denial of their equal moral status. This would be the case if
we have a duty rather than a mere permission to hold others responsible for their
wrongdoing, a duty which itself is grounded in the interests of the victim. In that
case, failing to do our duty to hold others responsible for their wrongdoing would
fail to respect the interests of the victim as a guide to our actions.

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Poverty and Criminal Responsibility 403

Here there is an important difference between the state and other agents with
respect to wrongs. The state has a special duty to hold people responsible for their
criminal wrongs, grounded in the fact that it provides a forum for public
condemnation of wrongdoing. This is provides some special considerations about
the injustice of the state failing to hold criminals responsible for their wrongdoing.
Leaving that aside, individuals often do not have a duty to hold each other
responsible for wrongdoing. They sometimes even have an obligation to refrain
from doing that. They certainly should not all independently hold the wrongdoer
responsible for what he has done through practices of responsibility. Where one
person has held another responsible for his wrongdoing, it is not morally required,
and it may be morally prohibited, for others to do so. Let us suppose that an
employee of a university breaks an important promise at work. The head of his
department calls him to account for doing so. The employee recognizes that he has
done something wrong, apologizes, and thereby fosters the expectation that he will
in the future fulfill his duties of promise-keeping. In that case, it would be wrong for
the Vice Chancellor to engage the employee in a similar practice of responsibility
again. Since he has been held responsible for what he has done, others should refrain
from holding him responsible. For this reason, the most that we can say is that there
is a duty on the best placed agent to hold wrongdoers responsible for their
wrongdoing, and perhaps we cannot say even that.
This provides us with good reason often to prefer the third to the second case. In
the third case, Sally does not hold Ted responsible for his wrongdoing through a
defective practice of responsibility. She does not fail to do her duty to the victim
through this failure, and hence she does not fail to respect Ted’s interests through
her inaction. She then leaves it open for others, including Ted himself, to hold him
and her, responsible for his wrongdoing. An ideal practice of responsibility may be
available through which he can be held responsible for what he has done. In that
case, she should not engage in a defective practice, since in engaging in a defective
practice she may block a more ideal practice of responsibility from taking place.
This suggests that in failing to hold Ted responsible in the third case, Sally does
not imply that he is entitled to go on breaching the principles that ought to govern
relationships between human beings. She does not deny her equal moral status to
him. She does not deny that he should be held responsible for doing what he has
done. In refraining from holding him responsible, she allows others, who are better
placed than she, to do so. Perhaps they can do so without perpetrating a further
injustice against Ted.
Therefore, there are two reasons why we ought sometimes to refrain from
engaging in defective practices of responsibility. One is that the wrong that the
accuser does to the accused in defective practices of responsibility might be more
significant than the value of holding the wrongdoer responsible for what he has
done. The other is that in holding another person responsible for what he has done
through a defective practice of responsibility, the accuser might block practices of
responsibility that are closer to the ideal.
Building further on the value of our practices of responsibility will help us to see
why claims of complicity might be more powerful than claims of hypocrisy, and
thus meet the second objection as well. In hypocritically criticizing someone for

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wrongdoing, the hypocrite perpetrates a wrong against the person. He implies either
that the moral principles that apply to her do not apply to him or he treats the person
as being obliged to be morally scrutinized for her wrongdoing while denying that it
is appropriate to be morally scrutinized himself. In that case, we may well ask why
there should be anything special about complicity. Are not all of the morally
significant ideas in place in cases of hypocrisy?
To answer this, we must explore a further feature of our practices of responsibility:
their focus on particular acts. Practices of responsibility have value in repairing our
moral relations with each other. They primarily achieve this by being act focused.
They are focused on holding people responsible for the particular acts that they
perform rather than for their moral conduct in general. One reason why this is so
is that the primary relationship that we are attempting to repair is between
the wrongdoer and the victim. The normal way in which this relationship must
be repaired is by encouraging the wrongdoer to see the effect of his wrongdoing on
the victim. Our moral principles are grounded in the fact that we ought to see
significant interests of our fellow human beings as reasons for action. The
significance of the interests is in turn grounded in their moral status as agents who
are governed by norms. When a wrong is perpetrated, the wrongdoer has shown a
failure to recognize such an interest as a reason for action, and that normally results
in the interest being set back. In getting the agent to focus on the effects of his
wrongdoing, we encourage him to reflect on the interest that the agent has, and in turn
on its significance given her equal moral status. This provides the victim with the
opportunity to have it recognized that her status is taken seriously, something that has
been called into question by the fact that she has been wronged.
Given that practices of responsibility are act focused in this way, we can see why
claims based on complicity erode standing to a greater degree than claims based on
hypocrisy. Let us suppose that Paul engages Rachel in a practice of responsibility
about a particular wrongful act which he is complicit in, but he blocks attempts to
hold him responsible for that act. In doing so, he implies that Rachel must respond
to her wrongdoing by recognizing that the interest of the victim underpins a moral
principle that she ought not to have perpetrated the wrong. But he denies that he
must respond to the interest in that way and through that repair his relationship with
the victim. The victim is provided with an opportunity for the individuals
responsible to repair their relationship with her by accepting the moral significance
of her interests. In holding Rachel responsible for the wrong while denying his
responsibility, Paul implies that the moral obligation to repair applies especially to
her with respect to this instance of wrongdoing. Hence, the claim that he and Rachel
face different moral demands is especially stark. In cases of hypocrisy, in contrast,
Paul might claim that others are entitled to hold him responsible for the wrongs he
has perpetrated, where the wrongs have set back the interests of other victims.

3 Complicity and the Unjust Creation of Criminogenic Conditions

Let us take up the central claim that the grounds of the state’s entitlement to hold
poor people responsible for the crimes they commit in conditions of economic

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injustice are eroded by the fact that the state has a kind of complicity in the crimes.
The state is complicit insofar as the economic injustice it perpetrates creates
criminogenic conditions: conditions in which it is more likely that crimes will be
committed. This claim provides a powerful reason why the state should not hold the
poor responsible for the crimes they commit.
That is not to say that there are other relational and non-relational reasons against
the state holding the poor responsible for what they do. For one thing, the state
would behave hypocritically in holding the poor responsible for what they do. In
creating criminogenic conditions through distributive injustice, the state not only
treats the poor unjustly with respect to their level of wealth, it also shows itself to
have insufficient concern about crimes of that kind being committed. One reason not
to perpetrate distributive injustice is that distributive injustice is criminogenic. In
perpetrating distributive injustice, the state shows itself to have insufficient concern
for the victims of crime. Hence, in holding the poor responsible for what they do,
the state claims that the poor should be held responsible for violating their moral
obligations while denying the entitlement of the poor to hold it responsible for
failing to adhere to those very obligations.
Furthermore, there are other relational reasons to deny that the state is entitled to
hold the poor criminally responsible in these circumstances. The poor can claim that
as the state has treated them unjustly, they are entitled to distance themselves from
engaging in relations of responsibility with the state. Given that the state perpetrates
an economic injustice against them, they have good reason to think that it is
insufficiently morally concerned about them. Thus they have reason to believe that
the state will deprive them of adequate opportunities to participate in its practices of
responsibility and to show adequate regard for their well-being in punishing them.
In current conditions, there are plenty of other reasons for the poor to believe that
these things are true. But even were we to improve our system of trials and
punishments, the poor would have some reason not to participate in them, given that
they are treated unjustly in economic terms.
These things are relatively uncontroversial philosophically, though they are very
controversial in the real world. More philosophically controversial, but also more
powerful, is the claim that the state is complicit in the crimes of the poor. The power
of showing that the state is complicit in the crimes of the poor should be clear
enough not only from the previous discussion of complicity, but also from the fact
that the claim of complicity can be added to the claims of hypocrisy and the
entitlement to distance oneself from relations of responsibility following wrong-
doing just discussed.
To show that the claim of complicity is plausible, the following question needs to
be addressed. Why does one agent become complicit in the wrongdoing of others
merely by creating the conditions in which others are more likely to commit those
wrongs even if the one agent does not intend that the others will commit that wrong?
Only conspiracy theorists believe that our political leaders, in perpetrating economic
injustices against the poor, intend that the poor will commit crimes. At most, they
know that the poor will be more likely to commit crimes in circumstances of
economic injustice. This is just the kind of controversy that might arise in other
familiar issues concerning complicity. We may well ask, for instance, to what extent

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someone is complicit in the use of child labor by buying clothes that she knows are
made in sweatshops that use children.
In pressing the objection that complicity cannot stretch this far, the objector
might focus on the actus reus of complicity, its mens rea, or on the conjunction of
the two. With respect to the actus reus, the objector might claim that in creating the
conditions in which it is more likely that the poor will commit crimes, the state has
done nothing to assist the crimes, and hence cannot be regarded as complicit in
them. With respect to the mens rea, the objector might claim that as the state lacks
the intention that the poor will commit crimes, it ought not to be regarded as
complicit in the crimes. But as we will see, the actus reus and the mens rea claims
are highly implausible independently, and this helps to establish that they ought not
to be regarded as plausible in conjunction.
Let us begin with the actus reus claim. The objector’s thought here is that
creating the conditions where it is more likely that a crime will occur is not a
complicit act. To test the claim, we should consider cases where the agent has the
greatest degree of fault. Let us suppose that government officials think that they can
hold onto power more effectively in conditions where the poor commit crimes.
When the poor commit crimes, security based arguments have more force, and such
arguments are easier for the government to make than for their main political
opponents, who have a long civil liberties tradition. Since the officials have read
criminological literature showing that criminal offending increases in circumstances
of greater inequality, they develop regressive taxation policies. We could not then
deny that the state is complicit in the crimes of the poor, in a way that erodes their
entitlement to hold them responsible for those crimes.
The mens rea claim is even weaker. In standard cases of complicity by
assistance, the agent acts with knowledge that the principal agent will commit the
crime, but without the intention that he will do so. If Smith provides the hit-man
with the gun for cash, knowing that he will shoot Jones, but not caring whether he
does so, or even if Jones hopes that he will fail in his plan, Jones is complicit in the
shooting. Our conception of complicity would be cast very narrowly if we were to
require complicit agents to have an intention for the principal agent to perform the
crime.
It might be argued here that while the state knows that the crime rate will
increase in conditions of inequality, it does not know that any particular poor person
will commit a crime. Therefore, this should be seen as a case of reckless complicity
rather than knowing complicity, and hence the claim that the state is not entitled to
hold a particular poor person responsible for what the person has done is
significantly weakened. But it is difficult to see how that could be right. Let us
suppose that Smith is instructed by a gangland boss to provide a hit-man with a gun,
but he is yet to select a hit-man from his little black book. Smith provides the gun by
leaving it in a safety deposit box for the selected hit-man to pick up. The gangland
boss then selects a particular hit-man. Later Smith attempts to hold the hit-man
responsible for shooting Jones. The fact that Smith did not know that it would be
him in particular that commits the wrong cannot make any difference to his claim
that Smith is not entitled to hold him responsible for what he has done. It also cannot
make any difference that Smith does not know that he is going to shoot Jones in

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particular, at least if there is no good reason for Smith to want to see Jones in
particular shot.
Given that both the objector’s actus reus claim and his mens rea claim are very
weak independently, we have good reason to doubt that they can succeed in
conjunction. However, we should consider arguments that they cannot succeed.
Here is one kind of argument. The actus reus of complicity is differentiated: there
are different kinds of complicity which reflect the different ways in which one
person might be involved in the principal agent’s crime. Some kinds of complicity
require an intention that the principal agent commit his crime where others do not.
In providing assistance, it might be argued, knowledge that the principal agent will
commit his crime, or even recklessness, is sufficient for complicity. But that is not
sufficient in other cases and particularly not in cases where complicity takes the
form of the creation of conditions under which the principal agent’s wrongful
conduct is more likely to occur.
Here is the kind of example that might seem to make this plausible. Let us suppose
that Susan runs a door to door sales company in Klanfield where a high proportion of
residents are members of a racist organization. A number of her employees are black.
Susan sends her black employees into Klanfield, knowing that some of them will be
assaulted. Her employees are aware of the risks posed by visiting Klanfield, but many
of them take the risk in order to keep their jobs. Derek, a racist resident of Klanfield,
assaults John, one of Susan’s black employees. We may consider these two variations
on the case. In the first case Susan sends her employees to Klanfield because she is a
racist who wants to see them assaulted, even though she could make just as much
money sending them elsewhere. In the second case, Susan sends her employees to
Klanfield knowing that some of them will be assaulted, but she does it just because it
will make her more money than sending them elsewhere.
It might seem that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between these cases. In
the first case, Derek unknowingly carries out Susan’s plan to see black people
assaulted. In the second case, he does not. That makes Susan complicit in the first
case but not in the second, it might be argued. This may reveal itself in the intuition
that whereas Susan cannot hold Derek responsible for assaulting John in the first
case, she can do so in the second.
The first thing to note about these cases is that the intentions of the party are
irrelevant if the person’s actions are not wrong at all. If she has not done something
that is even prima facie wrong, she need not provide a reason why she did what she
did. Let us suppose that Jake is a gun seller, who is permitted, both legally and
morally, to sell guns to people who fulfill some criteria. Harry comes into Jake’s
shop, fulfilling the criteria. Jake intends that he will commit a crime with the gun.
That fact alone cannot make him complicit. If he has done what he is permitted to
do, he has not fulfilled the actus reus of complicity. Jake only needs to provide
justifications for his wrongful acts. Under these conditions, since selling the gun is
permissible, he can perform that action for any reason whatsoever.11 If that is right,
we should be cautious about regarding Susan as complicit in the first case.

11
See John Gardner, ‘‘Justifications and Reasons,’’ in Offences and Defences (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); see also Tadros, Criminal Responsibility, ch. 10.

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But let us suppose that what Susan has done in sending her employees to Klanfield
is prima facie wrong. Why might it make a difference whether she intends them to be
assaulted or merely knew that they would be? The answer is the familiar one that we
can sometimes justify proportionate foreseen harm to others even if we cannot justify
intentional harms to others. Here we may compare the well known pair of examples
of a strategic bomber and a terror bomber. During a justified war, a strategic bomber
drops a bomb on a munitions factory next to a school, killing a number of children, in
order to deprive the enemy of vital munitions and end the war, thereby reducing loss
of civilian lives overall. A terror bomber drops a bomb on a school, intending to kill
the same number of children, in order to demoralize the enemy and end the war,
thereby reducing loss of civilian lives by the same number overall. Many people
think that if the number of lives saved is big enough, the strategic bomber might be
justified in dropping his bomb where the terror bomber is not.
This distinction might be thought relevant here as well. It might be thought that
Susan can justify sending her employees to Klanfield in the second case, knowing
that they will be assaulted but that she cannot justify it in the first case.12 Sending
her employees to Klanfield might be thought justifiable. But if it is justifiable, it is
nevertheless prima facie wrong. Hence, she must provide a reason for sending the
employees there, to turn a justifiable action into a justified one, and given her bad
intentions she cannot provide such a reason. Assuming that it is justifiable to send
her employees to Klanfield, such a reason is available to Susan in the second case.
Hence, her intentions can plausibly make a difference in a case like this.
But this difference between intended and foreseen consequences is relevant, if it
is, only because we are concerned with a justifiable action. By stipulation, our focus
is on cases where the state has committed a wrong of economic injustice, not only
prima facie but all things considered. We are in the realm of actions which are not
only unjustified but unjustifiable. In that case the distinction between the intention
that poor people will commit crimes and knowledge that they will do so cannot play
the kind of role that it might play in the analysis of the previous example. That
militates strongly in favor of seeing the state as complicit in the crimes of the poor.
The fact that the poor are more likely to commit crimes in circumstances of injustice
provides a further reason against doing something that is already wrong. The state
cannot then claim that it is not complicit in those crimes on the grounds that it
regrets their occurrence.
It might be thought, however, that even if the state is complicit in the crimes of
the poor, this kind of case shows up a concern about the relationship between
complicity and the entitlement to hold others responsible. To see the concern, let us
suppose that Susan sends her employees to Klanfield because it will make her more
money than sending them elsewhere, but that she is wrong to do this. Considerations
concerning their safety ought to have led her to send them elsewhere, even though
she would make less money in doing so. In the case where Susan sends her
employees to Klanfield intending that they are assaulted by the racist residents, it is
12
Cf. Judith Jarvis Thomson Rights, Restitution and Risk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986); see also Thomas Scanlon, ‘‘Intention and Permissibility I,’’ 74 Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society Supplementary Volumes (2000); F. M. Kamm, Intricate Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), pp. 132–133; and Tadros, Criminal Responsibility, ch. 10.

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clearly absurd for her to hold the residents responsible for what they have done. In
the case where she acts on financial grounds, though, any claim that she is are not
entitled to hold the racist residents responsible for what they have done seems weak.
It may be thought that the same concern arises with respect to the state’s complicity
in the crimes of the poor. However, there is a significant difference between the
Klanfield case and the poverty case, which explains our intuitions about the Klanfield
case. In the Klanfield case, the racist attitudes of the residents cause an injustice not
only to Susan’s black employees but also to her. She is not morally permitted to send
her employees into Klanfield because of the tendency of others to do wrong, and that
restricts her economic opportunities. This fact counts heavily against barring her from
holding the residents responsible for the wrongs that they commit against her
employees. The residents cannot say to her: ‘‘If you did not want your employees to be
assaulted, you should not have sent them to visit us.’’ They cannot say this because she
should be entitled to send her employees to visit them, and it is their propensity to do
wrong that prevents her from having such a moral permission. No similar kind of
claim is available to the state with respect to the crimes of the poor.
The poor have a significant claim that the state is not entitled to hold them
responsible for the crimes that they commit. The idea is not just that the state would
be hypocritical in holding the poor responsible for their crimes they commit, in that
it has shown itself to be insufficiently concerned about criminal offending through
the creation of conditions under which offending is more likely to occur. It is not
just that the poor, in having been treated unjustly by the state, have a good reason to
distance themselves from the state with respect to practices of responsibility. Both
these things are true. But the claim is also based on the state’s complicity in their
crimes. Even if they cannot deny that they are responsible for their crimes, the poor
can deny that the state is entitled to hold them responsible, on the grounds that the
state has created unjust conditions in which their responsible criminal offending
becomes more likely. As a consequence it bears responsibility for their crimes.
Importantly, this also shows why this kind of claim is more powerful when made
by the poor than it is when it is made by the rich in circumstances of injustice,
something that has intuitive plausibility. A rich person who is responsible for
committing a crime has a claim of hypocrisy. He can suggest that the state, in
creating conditions of economic injustice, shows itself to be insufficiently concerned
about crimes of this kind being committed, and therefore that it cannot hold him
responsible for committing his crime. But that claim is relatively weak. The state
treats the commission of such crimes as a reason against perpetrating economic
injustice against the poor, but a reason that is not sufficiently strong to defeat its
motivations in perpetrating such injustices. The poor, in contrast, claim that the state
is in part responsible for the crimes that they commit. As it bears responsibility for
the crime, it is not entitled to hold others responsible for it.

4 Compounding Injustice

Insofar as the two conditions with which we began are satisfied, the poor have a
legitimate claim that the state should not hold them responsible for the crimes that

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they commit on three grounds. The first is that the state is hypocritical in holding
them responsible, in that it shows itself, through perpetrating economic injustice, to
be insufficiently concerned about their crimes by creating criminogenic conditions.
The second is that as victims of injustice, they have legitimate reasons to distance
themselves from state practices of responsibility. Given the way they have been
treated, they have no expectation that justice will be done within those practices.
The third ground is that the state is complicit in their crimes. It bears responsibility
for those crimes, and is not entitled to act as judge in a case where it ought to be a
co-defendant.
The poor may have a claim that the state cannot hold them responsible for crimes
they commit. Nothing said thus far entails that the poor have a right that the state
should refrain from holding them responsible for the crimes that they commit.
Instead, a kind of injustice is perpetrated by the state against the poor when it holds
them responsible for their crimes even if they are criminally responsible for them.
At least the state commits such an injustice so insofar as it does not fully recognize
its own responsibility for the wrongdoing of the poor.13 It was suggested earlier that
an ideal practice of responsibility might involve complicit parties holding their
partners in crime and themselves responsible for the crimes they commit. Could we
imagine a criminal justice process, or some other practice of responsibility, in which
the poor are held responsible for the crimes that they commit but the state also
accepts its responsibility for the crimes?
In order adequately to accept responsibility for the crimes of the poor, the state
would have to create the expectation that it will not act in such a way that it is
complicit with similar crimes in the future. It could do this only by rectifying
criminogenic economic injustice. If such a practice is possible at all, it is possible only
at the point that an economically unjust state becomes just. At that moment, it has a
full entitlement to hold the poor criminally responsible, insofar as it accepts its
complicity in their crimes. Until then, though, it cannot claim that it accepts
responsibility for complicity. Failing that, we may ask if the argument provided so far
warrants an absolute bar on the state holding the poor responsible for the crimes they
commit. In order to see why not we should consider the concern that in failing to hold
the poor responsible for the crimes that they commit the state may perpetrate another
kind of injustice: an injustice against victims and potential victims of crime. If there is
such a thing as criminal justice, it must sometimes be just for the state to hold people
responsible for their crimes. At least sometimes, moreover, this is not something that
the state is merely entitled to do; it is something that the state is required to do.
Citizens can rightly demand that the state provides public condemnation for
serious criminal wrongdoing. A failure to condemn serious criminal wrongdoing,
where the responsible person is known to us, constitutes a serious injustice: the
injustice of failing to publicly recognize the moral significance of the victim and her
interests.
For this reason, in conditions of economic injustice, the state is caught in a moral
dilemma with respect to criminal justice. It must, in one way or another, compound
the injustice that it has perpetrated through its unjust distribution of wealth. Either it

13
See Duff, Answering for Crime, pp. 192–193.

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must hold the poor responsible for the crimes that they commit, perpetrating one
kind of criminal injustice. Alternatively it must fail to do so, perpetrating another
kind of criminal injustice.14 Economic injustice is not only wrong for intrinsic
reasons, then. It is wrong because it is inevitably compounded by criminal injustice
of one kind or another.
It is worth asking why crime victims might have an interest in the state holding
the person who has committed the crime responsible for the crime that he has
committed. It is useful to distinguish intrinsic and instrumental reasons here.
Citizens have a reason to want the offender to be held responsible for its own sake.
One central reason has to do with state condemnation for the wrong that has been
done to them. Let us assume, though it is often not safe to assume, that the crime
that has been committed against the victim is legitimately a crime. Furthermore, let
us suppose that since it does not merely rectify the economic injustice that the state
perpetrated, the victim can regard herself as worse off than she ought to be in some
respect. Perhaps that might be because the crime deprives her of something other
than her wealth, say because it involves interference with bodily integrity or because
it results in her being economically worse off than she ought to be.
For the criminalization of some conduct to be legitimate, the conduct proscribed
must be not only wrongful but publicly wrongful. It must be the kind of wrong that
the public has a legitimate interest in condemning through public institutions. One
reason that has been given to explain why the public might have such an interest is
that condemning the defendant’s conduct expresses a kind of solidarity with the
victim. The defendant, through his conduct, indicates to the victim that she lacks full
status as a human being. The state, in investigating, prosecuting, convicting, and
condemning the defendant’s conduct vindicates the victim’s standing as having
equal worth.15 It expresses condemnation in order to express public solidarity with
the victim in order to confirm that the state, unlike the defendant, recognizes her
human status. Whether or not we think that condemnation is expressed through
punishment, many legal theorists will agree that this is an appropriate role for a
criminal conviction to play.16
Let us suppose that the state is not entitled to hold the defendant responsible for
committing this crime. In that case, the state fails to condemn what has been done to
the victim, and hence fails to respond to the defendant’s manifest attitude towards
her status. Hence, her legitimate demand, that the state re-affirms her human status
through prosecution and conviction, is denied to her. It is for this reason that we
might think that states that lack adequate laws of rape and murder, or an adequate
criminal justice machinery for the prosecution and conviction of those offences,
violate the human rights of their citizens. These failures constitute a failure to take

14
Duff, ‘‘‘I Might Be Guilty, But You Can’t Try Me’: Estoppel and Other Bars to Trial,’’ pp. 245, 257–
259.
15
See Jean Hampton, ‘‘Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Retribution,’’ in The Intrinsic Worth of Persons:
Contractarianism in Moral and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
16
See Thomas Scanlon, ‘‘Punishment and the Rule of Law,’’ in The Difficulty of Tolerance: Essays in
Political Philosophy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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412 V. Tadros

seriously the state’s responsibility to affirm the moral status of its citizens when that
status is denied by others.
In considering the instrumental value of convictions, there is a range of criminal
offences the existence of which cannot plausibly be defended as public wrongs done
to victims. Particularly important are offences of security which are designed to
enhance the security of the population as a whole. Possession offences are the most
common, but even offences such as murder and rape have security as part of their
rationale. Many of our offences ought to be repealed or rewritten in the light of
normative concerns. One such concern is based on the value of security itself. It is
questionable whether some of our criminal offences enhance security at all. Some
clearly erode security of a kind, such as security from interference by the state in the
form of wrongful investigations, prosecutions, and convictions. Furthermore, some
offences, particularly in the area of terrorism, erode the security of people who have
a relatively low level of security already.
For the sake of argument, let us consider a security based offence which is just.
The English offence which prohibits possession of an automatic weapon is plausibly
an offence of that kind.17 It is an offence which provides security to those
individuals who are least secure, as well as the rest of us, in that gun crime is likely
to be more prevalent in poor urban communities. It does this, moreover, with a
relatively minor interference with liberty. Not many people have a very strong
reason to want to possess an automatic weapon.18 Let us suppose that a poor person
possesses an automatic firearm. He claims that the state is not entitled to hold him
responsible for that, given its complicity in what he has done. But members of the
poorest communities can then counterclaim that the state must hold him responsible
for doing so, inasmuch as a failure to do that to him, and others like him, further
erodes their security.
Given that they are victims of economic injustice, the poor are almost certainly
more insecure than they ought to be. This will be so for two reasons. First, poverty,
or at least poverty which is a consequence of injustice, is almost certainly a cause of
an increase in the crime rate, particularly in poor communities. Second, because the
poor have less wealth than they ought to have, they have less money to spend on
enhancing their security. One advantage of being wealthy is that the wealthy can
make themselves more secure from crime, by living in more expensive safer places,
by purchasing security alarms and by choosing to go to more expensive restaurants,
clubs, and bars where crime is less likely to occur. Therefore, failing to prosecute
and convict the offender of a security based offence might compound the injustice
done to others who are already victims of injustice.
For these reasons, we should not think that the claim of complicity provides an
absolute bar on prosecuting the poor for the crimes that they commit. Let us suppose
that the state is complicit in the crimes of the poor, by perpetrating economic
injustices against them which make them more likely to offend. That provides a
reason not to hold the poor responsible for the crimes they commit. But the state
must attend not only to the injustices that result from prosecution and conviction but

17
See Section 51 of the Firearms Act 1968.
18
See Victor Tadros, ‘‘Crimes and Security’’ 71 Modern Law Review (2008).

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also the injustices that result from a failure to prosecute and convict. In some cases,
however, while failing to prosecute and convict the offender will cause some
injustice to the victim or to other citizens, the injustice is insufficiently grave to
outweigh the injustice of holding the offender responsible for what he has done.
This will particularly be true with respect to victimless crimes which have impact
primarily on the security of the well off.
When we express the idea that we should not hold the poor responsible for the
crimes that they commit we are likely to be faced with two responses. One is that
the poor have adequate opportunities to do things other than what they did. It is
often pointed out that the poor are not compelled to commit crimes, that other poor
people do not do it, and that poverty cannot, except in extremis, be either a
justification or excuse for criminal offending. The other is that in failing to hold the
poor responsible for what they have done, we patronize them. We act as though they
do not count as full moral agents, which is something that they have good reason to
resist.
In many cases, both of these responses are along the right lines. The poor are
responsible agents, whose offending is rarely justified. Yet there may nevertheless
be good reasons why we should not hold them responsible in a criminal trial for the
crimes that they commit. Even if they are properly held responsible, there are good
reasons for us to feel uneasy about that and to regret the injustice that has been
perpetrated against them. By creating conditions of injustice in which poor people
are more likely to commit crimes, we, as democratic citizens, show ourselves not
only to be willing to treat the poor unjustly, we show ourselves to be insufficiently
motivated to create less criminogenic conditions. We must bear some responsibility
for the crimes that they commit, and this provides us with a reason not to hold those
individuals responsible for their crimes. As we are complicit in their crimes, we
should be co-defendants rather than judges. To refrain from holding them
responsible is not to patronize them as having a lack of ability or moral status,
and it is not to justify or excuse their conduct. It is to accept our own responsibility
for what they responsibly do. If we nevertheless have sufficient reason to hold them
responsible for what they do, we ought also to regret this fact, and to respond
accordingly. At least we can say that the hearts of bleeding hearted liberals have
good reason to bleed.19

19
An earlier version of this article was delivered to the political philosophy discussion group at Queen’s
University in Kingston Ontario. I would like to thank the participants, the organizers Malcolm Thorburn,
and Andrew Lister, and also Kimberley Brownlee and Andrew Williams for their generous comments and
discussion.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.