Situationism, capacities and culpability

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people’s behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these subjects’ responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, assess when agents a reduced capacity avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals the reasonable person standard, counterfactuals understandability behaviour, base rates then proposes should think certain factor impeded this best explanation change patterns responses. With approach hand, I argue subjects many (mostly) excused for their actions.