Youth and Diminished Responsibility

This work is focused on two related questions. First, why does youth diminish moral responsibility for actions? And second, what does the answer to this question tell us about responsibility more generally. I argue that children are not exempt from moral responsibility on the grounds that they are not moral agents. Instead, I argue that in the right circumstances, many young people are morally responsible for their actions. I then develop a theory of diminished or partial responsibility intended to explain why and when young people are eligible for partial excuse.;The law's normal construction of the person presumes that people are competent, free, and generally rational individuals who can be expected to understand the demands of the law. All of these assumptions are challenged by immaturity, so the courts have had to develop a theory of immature agency. The reality of this theory is more complicated than the explicit brightline age distinctions between children and adult permits. I argue that person who has the capacities and skills for good normative judgment is normatively competent. Normative competence is a set of skills and capacities, a person may have them in degree. This approach to responsibility helps accommodate both the progressive nature of moral development, and the fact that having judgmental competence in one setting does not guarantee one will have it under other circumstances.;Normative competence has two elements---reasons-responsiveness and self-ownership. Reasons-responsiveness provides justification for attributing moral agency to a person. It makes possible judgments like "Jim did a bad thing." This is presupposed by judgments of moral deservingness. But it is not enough to establish moral accountability, which makes possible judgments like "Jim deserves blame for doing a bad thing." To capture accountability, I argue that normative competence must include an ownership condition. A person owns an action when she makes it independently and authentically. Ownership is a constructive skill at bringing independent judgments in line with authentic ones. This is something that separates people who are accountable in the fullest sense from those who are not.