Tadros, “Poverty and Criminal Responsibility”

Victor Tadros takes on an intriguing perspective on when we should hold people responsible for criminalized behavior. In order to set the stage for his argument in “Poverty and Criminal Responsibility”, Tadros has the reader assume two things. The first assumption is that poor people in a society are as poor as a consequence of distributive justice. The next is that poor people are more likely to commit criminal offenses (Tadros, 391). By making these points it follows that poverty is criminogenic, meaning it will lead to an increase in crime, and also that the state has a responsibility to reduce these criminogenic conditions. By perpetrating economic injustice, the state has failed to fulfil their responsibilities. Tadros will examine if poor people should be held responsible for their crimes, and will evaluate a few possibilities until he reaches his final argument. The first possibility is that poor individuals may lack “status responsibility”, meaning the capacities required for full moral interpersonal relationships. This could be due to lack of education or socialization opportunities and would mean that we decide to exclude them from societal and political norms and relationships. However, this is a very strong and possibly dangerous way to proceed in evaluating people as lacking status responsibility because we should seek to include others in our social and political relationships and evaluating this line is tricky. By stripping anyone of this we deny them rights and obligations that come alongside reciprocal moral and political relationships (Tadros, 392). The next possibility is that some are justified in their crimes. This could mean that one who is poor is justified in taking from someone who has an unfair excess of wealth. Thus, this person simply is moving the distribution of wealth in the direction towards justice. The perpetrator would be responsible for stealing, but not criminally responsible by these standards since no crime was committed by the stealing. But this possibility ignores the question of whether we can hold people responsible for criminal acts in general in cases in which the state has been economically unjust (Tadros, 392). A last possibility is allowing a person who is poor to take the blame for their crime, but not impose any burdens upon them for their actions because they only had bad choices available. However, this fails to help erase the blame for their crimes, it only restricts punishment (Tadros, 392).

Tadros takes a strong stance in coming to the argument that our right to blame a person who committed a crime is not well-founded if we have perpetrated the injustice. Two reasons for this can be hypocrisy and complicity. Complicity will be the more important argument in terms of the states responsibility to this crime. Complicity implies that one agent participates in the wrong done by someone else. This denies that agent the standing to hold the other person responsible (Tadros, 393). Tadros argues that the state is complicit in the crimes of the poor since they created the economic injustices that have led to the criminogenic patterns. A person may be responsible for an action but it is possible we may lack the standing to hold them responsible. The state in principle has this standing to hold people responsible for certain actions, but this standing can be compromised. These can be brought about in cases of hypocrisy and complicity to the crimes. However, if it is valuable to hold people responsible for their wrongs, then a state who loses standing to hold the person who is poor responsible is only compounding their wrongdoing. Ideally, since both actors have done wrong, both should hold each other responsible and themselves responsible via self-criticism at the same time (Tadros, 400). Since the state is complicit insofar as economic injustice creates the criminogenic conditions the state is complicit in their crimes and thus lose any standing to hold the poor criminal responsible. The moral dilemma that takes place is that if they were not to hold the criminally responsible there is injustice however to hold the poor responsible for their crimes is also an injustice. Tadros has very interesting and strong ideas about reciprocal relationships in terms of morality. The idea is that one should only be held responsible by the state to the extent that the state is holding themselves responsible for their own involvement in that crime.

Tadros, Victor. (2009). Poverty and Criminal Responsibility. J Value Inquiry, 43:391–413. Retrieved October 26, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-009-9180-x.