Departmental Research Seminar

Holding intoxicated people responsible raises philosophical, as well as legal questions. This is because intoxication impairs the capacities usually required for holding someone morally or legally responsible – yet, most people are reticent to accept intoxication as an excuse. To inform theoretical work on how society should respond to intoxicated wrongdoing, this review synthesises empirical studies on whether and how people in fact attribute moral responsibility for intoxicated wrongs.

Adopting the scoping methodology of Arksey and O’Malley (2005), we searched databases 2000- 2025, and describe the literature thematically. The 70 included studies used a range of methodologies and showed little consistency in how moral responsibility, and related constructs such as blame and accountability, were conceptualised. However several general themes were identified. First, there is evidence that some people do regard intoxication as reducing perpetrators’ responsibility, particularly for gendered crimes such as sexual assault, and that perpetrator blame is affected by a range of seemingly extraneous factors, including whether victims were intoxicated. Second, although people often appear to think intoxication excuses, they may simultaneously deny that intoxication should excuse or display 'moral dumbfounding' when asked for their rationale. Third, legal guilt and apt punishment levels appear to be less likely to be reduced by offender intoxication than responsibility, blame, and other related constructs.