Blaming the Kids: Children's Agency and Diminished Responsibility

BLAMING THE KIDS: CHILDREN’S AGENCY AND DIMINISHEDRESPONSIBILITY

MICHAEL G. TIBORIS

Abstract. Children are less blameworthy for their beliefs and actions because they areyoung. But the relationship between development and responsibility is complex. What ex-actly grounds the excuses we rightly give to young agents? This article presents three dis-tinct arguments for children’s diminished responsibility. Drawing on significant resourcesfrom developmental psychology, it rejects views which base the normative adult/childdistinction on children’s inability to participate in certain kinds of moral communicationor to form principled self-conceptions which guide their actions. The article then arguesthat children’s responsibility ought to be diminished because (and to the degree that)they are less competent at using features of their moral agency to meet social demands.This ‘normative competence’ view is philosophically defensible, supported by research indevelopmental psychology, and provides us with a method to evaluate whether things likepeer pressure are relevant to responsibility.

Keywords: children, responsibility, agency, youth, developmental psychology, normativecompetence, self-constitution

1. Introduction

Most of the philosophical work on childhood has focused on whether children have rightsor interests which adults ought to respect and protect. This is an important question, but itis not the one I will take up here. This paper addresses children’s personal moral responsi-bility for their actions.1 Children’s responsibility is under-theorized despite its importancefor a variety of contexts, perhaps most obviously concerning juvenile criminal responsi-bility. Very young children are usually presumed to be incapable of responsibility. Theiractions may resemble the morally assessable actions of adults in form or consequence, butthey are somehow fundamentally di↵erent in ways which cannot support genuine moral as-sessment. There is, this suggests, a significant normative gap between adults and children.

1There are a handful of articles which raise this issue, though most do so as a corollary to the question ofchildren’s rights. Tamar Schapiro, ‘What is a Child?’, Ethics 109 (1999), and ‘Childhood and Personhood’,Arizona Law Review Vol. 45 (2003): 575-594; Robert Noggle, ‘Special Agents: Children’s Autonomy andParental Authority’ in David Archard and Colin Macleod (eds.) The Moral and Political Status of Children(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 97-117, and ‘Autonomy and the Paradox of Self-Creation’in James Stacey Taylor (ed.) Personal Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 87-108; FrancisSchrag, ‘The Child in the Moral Order’, Philosophy 52 (1977): 167-177; Onora ONeill, ‘Childrens Rightsand Childrens Lives’, Ethics 98 (1988): 445-463; See also Amy Mullin, ‘Children, Autonomy, and Care’,Journal of Social Philosophy 38.4 (Winter 2007): 536-553 for a discussion of the related claim that childrenare non-autonomous agents.

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2 MICHAEL G. TIBORIS

Meanwhile, the psychological, physical, and emotional development which underwrite thesedi↵erences happens incrementally and over a long period of education and development.This creates an interpretive problem, since our intuitive normative theory is out of stepwith facts about human development. This might not be as significant a problem if itweren’t for the fact that we spend a substantial part of our lives in the process of devel-opment and that many of the moral challenges we face arise within this period. So howshould we regard the actions of immature agents who are not infants, but are neverthelessnot adults?

It is tempting to think that the only really significant question here is the empiricalone of whether children are or aren’t su�ciently mature to be responsible. But as TamarSchapiro rightly points out, this risks ‘neglecting the task of articulating and defendingthe principles on the basis of which a given deficiency ... is taken to warrant paternalism,’or, one might add, to justify excuse.2 The empirical facts about development are certainlycrucial for applying these principles to individuals or classes of individuals and for testingthe validity of our theories, but the interesting philosophical question arises at the level ofarticulating the principled basis for the excuses given to the immature.

Consider an everyday kind of example, something that will be familiar to many parents:a six-year-old sneaking some particularly attractive item, a toy or candy, from a store.3 Bythis age, children are quite aware that there are rules contravening this kind of behavior.Some may respond by hiding the the fact that they’ve taken something. What, if anything,justifies the intuitive sense that this is quite a quite di↵erent act than it would be had itbeen done by an adult? There are a variety of questions to ask about the basis for thisdi↵erential judgment. Does the hiding response show a vague kind of moral awarenesswhich might ground responsibility, or is it just an automatic fear-driven response to adultdisapproval? Does the particular child’s capacity for understanding the wrongness of herbehavior matter? How about the fact that children tend to ‘grow out’ of behaviors likethis?4 Perhaps the relatively non-serious nature of the activity matters too, as is evidencedby our apparent willingness to send very young children to prison if the o↵ense is seriousenough even if we’re inclined to treat them as less responsible than adults for petty crimes.Simply pointing out that children are less responsible than adults or that responsibility isprogressive and scalar does not explain the basis for our tendency to excuse itself. Nordoes it explain which features of immaturity particularly matter for responsibility. Yet this

2Schapiro (2003) op. cit., p. 581n12.3I choose the example of a six-year-old because they are squarely in the period referred to as ‘young

childhood,’ which refers roughly to ages 3-10. I focus on this period because I hope readers will take itas a time when children uncontroversially fall short of full moral responsibility. When we’re talking aboutdevelopmental capacity, specificity about age matters a lot. The capacities of 3-year-olds are di↵erent bymiles than those of 10-year-olds. My subject in this essay, however, is youth generally and the assumptionsmade about it in philosophical arguments about responsibility. All that matters for my present purposesis that readers have in mind young people who are not infants, but are clearly not fully developed adults.Toward the end of the essay, I have some things to add about how my conclusions extend to the importantbut trickier cases of older children and adolescents.

4See Elizabeth Scott and Lawrence Steinberg, ‘Blaming Youth’, Texas Law Review Vol. 81 (2002):799-840, who consider the significance of ‘growing out of it.’

BLAMING THE KIDS: CHILDREN’S AGENCY AND DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY 3

is exactly what’s necessary when dealing with the wide set of interstitial cases in which weare most interested.

This essay concerns the grounds for the excuses we grant to children, and what it meansfor them to be partially responsible.5 It considers three di↵erent arguments, each of whichpicks up on di↵erent intuitions about the grounds of children’s partial excuse from respon-sibility. The first argument, which I call the moral communication view, emphasizes thefact that children cannot participate in the communicative exchanges crucial to adult in-terpersonal relationships. We generally presume that adults can engage with one anotherfrom the standpoint of rough moral equality necessary to support binding social contracts.Children cannot participate in these relationships as equals, so holding them responsible isinappropriate if this participation and equality are a precondition of certain kinds of rightsand responsibilities. The second argument, the self-constitution view, locates the crucialdi↵erence between adults and children in their ability to make choices from a principledevaluative perspective which represents their point of view as a moral agent. Moral adult-hood presumes that a person has this kind of perspective, and because children do nothave a stable authoritative ‘moral self’ or ‘self-constitution,’ they cannot be responsible.I reject these approaches and, in the final section of the essay, o↵er a third argument forgrounding the normative adult/child distinction. I argue that what matters is whetherchildren’s capacities allow them to make good moral judgments. In particular, I challengethe idea that there is some fundamental qualitative di↵erence between adults and childrenas moral agents. In my view, real moral responsibility—of the kind which can supportlegitimate judgments of praise and blame—can, in many contexts, be correctly applied tohumans who are biologically, psychologically, and socially immature. In addition to o↵er-ing conceptual arguments, I reference a substantial body of psychological evidence whichsupports this view and challenges the others.

2. The Communicative View

One influential view of responsibility claims that to be responsible is to be subject to acertain kind of moral communication. The cluster of views originating from P.F. Strawson’swork on the reactive attitudes share the general belief that to be responsible is to be heldresponsible in the right way.6 The ‘reactive attitudes’—e.g. praise, blame, resentment,and respect—are out of place when confronted with objects or agents who cannot processor participate in them. If I stub my toe on the table I might have malicious attitudesabout it, but this hardly counts as moral communication. When we are dealing withhumans, however, we do assume that they are able to participate in this kind of moralcommunication. Strawson’s general idea is that there is nothing more to responsibility

5For discussions of children’s legal responsibility, see Stephen Morse, ‘Immaturity and Irresponsibility,’The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88.1 (1997): 15-67; David O. Brink, ‘Immaturity, NormativeCompetence, and Juvenile Transfer: How (Not) to Punish Minors for Major Crimes’, Texas Law Review82, (2004): 1555.

6P.F. Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’ in Gary Watson (ed.)Free Will (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1962/2003), pp. 72-93; R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1994).


than the exchange of these attitudes, so the su�cient capacity for participating in them isa precondition of responsible agency.

If responsibility is fundamentally about the exchange of reactive attitudes, then thisrequires making some assumptions about the kinds of agents that can participate in theseexchanges and therefore be responsible. On the one hand, we expect moral agents tounderstand the normative content of the reactive attitudes in a way that is roughly correct.For this reason, we might exclude children from responsibility in many cases. Perhapsthe shoplifting child can sense a parent’s disapproval and hides what she did to avoid‘getting in trouble,’ but being responsible like an adult is responsible requires sensitivityto more complex evaluative attitudes which could authorize specifically moral disapproval.While adults approach one another with the assumption of roughly equal communicativeunderstanding, we tend to withhold this assumption when addressing children. Instead,as Strawson suggests, we take the ‘objective attitude’ toward them as ‘a consequenceof viewing the agent as incapacitated in some or all respects for ordinary interpersonalrelationships.’7 The objects of our objective attitudes may act intentionally, but theirinability to engage in complex moral communication places them outside the communityof responsible agents.

This provides us with a specific argument about the grounds for children’s diminishedresponsibility which I will call the moral communication view:

(MC): Children are not morally communicative agents of the kind that canparticipate in our practice of holding one another responsible, and thereforethey cannot be appropriate targets for responsibility.

The general goal an argument here is to explain why, while it might be perfectly fine tocorrect or even punish a child for misbehavior, the justification for responding in theseways cannot be that he deserves the punishment or should be resented for doing what hedid in the same way that it might be appropriate to resent or blame an adult who actedsimilarly. According to MC, the normative adult/child distinction rides on the fact thatchildren are not properly subject to the reactive attitudes because they cannot send andreceive them in complex enough ways to ground moral assessment. So, while they may actbadly and require correction, full-fledged moral blame seems inappropriate.

Here is a place where we must be careful not to confuse an empirical di↵erence betweenadults and children with a normative one. We can still ask what exactly makes it inappro-priate to hold the morally non-communicative to the standards of the reactive attitudes.8

One potential answer is that it is ine↵ective—akin to holding the table responsible for my

7Op. cit., p. 79-80. Strawson intends ‘incapacity’ very broadly here, as his examples about psychotherapysuggest. But the relevant feature in incapacity is the inability to participate in moral communication(specifically praising and blaming) regardless of its cause.

8Related versions of this ‘appropriateness’ criticism aimed at Strawson’s particular view about responsi-bility can be found in T.M. Scanlon, ‘The Significance of Choice’ in Gary Watson (ed.) Free Will (New York:Oxford University Press, 1988/2003), pp. 352-371; Gary Watson, ‘Free Action and Free Will’, Mind 96(April, 1987):154-72; Michael McKenna and Paul Russell, Free Will and Reactive Attitudes (London: Ash-gate, 2008); and Dana Nelkin, Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2011).


stubbed toe. However, there are clearly some pragmatic reasons why we might attemptmoral communication with children. Adults may ‘play at’ the social activity of holdingresponsible hoping that children will, at some point, make the leap from imitation to realparticipation. Even if this only comes across as disapprobation, rather than some morenuanced attitude like resentment, it can still serve as a mechanism for education. The factthat a child cannot fully understand the complexities of the reactive attitudes does notmake expressing them pointless.

Proponents of MC, however, might well accept this pragmatic reasoning and still be-lieve that there are important cases where blaming a child would be inappropriate evenif blaming-behavior would be an e↵ective tool for education. Protesting that, ‘she’s onlya child’ is meant to be morally exculpatory, and not just a suggestion about how muchforce to use in cajoling her to behave better. R. Jay Wallace, for example, writes thatblaming children by taking up the participant stance toward them is ‘not merely bad orundesirable, from the moral point of view, but wrong.’9 What he means by this is that,regardless of whether it is e↵ective, blaming children is wrong in the sense of being unjustor unfair. This better captures the motivation behind MC, but we are still in a positionto ask why someone’s being young makes it wrong, in the moral sense of unfairness orinjustice, to blame children through the reactive attitudes. Wallace’s answer is that thisasks young people to do something it is not in their power to do: engage in the relevantkind of moral communication about the value of their actions. Thus, because it is wrongin the sense of being deeply unfair to blame someone for doing something they could nothelp but do.10 To the extent that children do not have these communicative abilities, it iswrong in the sense of being unreasonable and unfair to demand that they use them.

It seems correct to me that fairness is indeed a central reason for tempering our attitudesabout children’s responsibility. Pointing out that someone is ‘just a child’ is at least some-times meant to suggest that she does not deserve blame. The argument above, however, isnot su�cient to secure the consequence that children are not appropriate targets for thereactive attitudes or moral responsibility. There are two reasons for this. One originates inan assumption the argument makes about children’s capacities, namely that many childrenare unable to participate in the kind of moral communication necessary to understand thereactive attitudes. There is reason to think that this is false, however, and that even veryyoung children have enough of this ability to make them responsible in many everydaycases. The basic capacities associated with moral communication show up very early, eventhough they develop significantly over time.

Young children have the general ability to grasp and apply moral reasons, and cansuccessfully use these abilities in remarkably sophisticated ways. As is well known, youngchildren begin to di↵erentiate between moral, social conventional, and personal rules ofconduct as early as year three.11 The ability to receive and communicate about these

9Wallace op. cit., p. 105.10This claim is also debatable, I think, but it’s not the focus of my criticism here.11Elliot Turiel, The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention (New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1983); W. Arsenio and K. Fleiss, ‘Typical and Behaviourally Disruptive Childrens


rules begins in early life.12 Psychologists have found that during early childhood (ages2.5 - 6) children develop the ability to recognize that there are rules embedded in others’emotional reactions which make demands on their own behavior. This skill is known as‘socioemotional competence’ and invokes a wide set of capacities, for example ‘awarenessof one’s own emotional state and the emotional states of others, the capacity for empathyand sympathy, and the realization that outward expressions do not necessarily reflect inneremotions.’13 Studies have found that children as young as two are receptive to others’emotional attitudes, and can see this as a reason to behave in ways which respond to thenormative demands embedded in these attitudes.14 While the emotional attitudes to whichyoung children are sensitive are more limited than those that many adults can grasp, theyare nevertheless quite a bit more sophisticated than one might suspect. For example, theyinclude principles of positive justice and ‘excuses on the grounds of incapacity or lack ofintention.’15 Children are able to apply these attitudes to themselves as guilt, pride, shame,and embarrassment around age 3.16 These are likely su�cient to handle a wide range ofinterpersonal cases.

A second reason to think the moralized version of MC is false is that whatever therelevant communicative capacities required for being responsible turn out to be, they willneed to be fairly minimal even for adults. We do not require that adults be able to pickup on the deep nuances in attitudes like resentment for them to count as participating in

Understanding of the Emotional Consequences of Socio-Moral Events’, British Journal of DevelopmentalPsychology 14 (1996): 173-186.

12Larry Nucci, ‘Morality and the Personal Sphere of Actions,’ in E. Turiel and T. Brown (eds) Valuesand Knowledge (Mahwan, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996); Judith Smetana, ‘Social-Cognitive Domain Theory: Consis-tencies and Variations in Childrens Moral and Social Judgments’ in Melanie Killen, Judith Smetana (eds.)Handbook of Moral Development. (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 119-153.

13Michael Cole, Sheila R. Cole, and Cynthia Lightfoot. The Development of Children, 5th ed. (New York:Worth Publishers, 2005), p. 283, cf. p. 385; Carolyn Saarni, ‘Emotional Competence: A DevelopmentalPerspective’ in R. Bar-On and J. Parker (eds.) The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence(San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 2000).

14I. Bretherton, et al., ‘Learning to Talk About Emotions’, Child Development, 57 (1986): 529-548; Onknowledge of adult standards in emotions: Judy Dunn, The Beginnings of Social Understanding (New York:Harvard University Press, 1988); Elliot Turiel, The Culture of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002); Nancy Eisenberg, et al. ‘A↵ect and Prosocial Responding’ in R. Davidson, et al. (Eds)Handbook of A↵ective Sciences(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Martin Ho↵man, Empathy andMoral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).On the ability to take these standards as reasons and responding to them: (as self-concerned reasons)J. Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Judy Dunn, ‘MoralDevelopment in Early Childhood and Social Interaction in the Family’ in Melanie Killen and Judith Smetana(eds.) Handbook of Moral Development. (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), pp. 334-335. (as other-concernedreasons) Turiel (2002) op. cit.

15Judy Dunn. ‘Moral Development in Early Childhood and Social Interaction in the Family’ in MelanieKillen and Judith Smetana (eds.) Handbook of Moral Development. (Mahwah, New Jersey: LawrenceErlbaum Associates, 2006), p. 334.

16Michael Mascolo, et al. ‘Dynamic Development of Component Systems of Emotions: Pride, Shameand Guilt in China and the United States’ in R. Davidson et al. (Eds.) Handbook of A↵ective Sciences.(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 375-408.


moral communication. We generally only require that a person can see that what theydid was wrong, roughly why, and roughly how they ought to respond. If we requiredhigh levels of complexity it would likely prevent many adults from passing the thresholdfor responsibility. Even if the psychological evidence above is incomplete or tentative, itstrongly suggests that these general abilities are present at a young age, and our desire tokeep the conditions for participation in moral discourse low enough to use day to day withmost adults encourage us to keep the threshold of ability low.

This challenges the central conclusion of MC—that it is unfair to treat children asblameworthy because they lack the communicative abilities central to the reactive attitudes.One possible response is for MC to concede this and, contrary to our initial intuition, claimthat children are in fact appropriate targets for the reactive attitudes in many cases (thisis ultimately the route I defend). However, another available alternative is explaining thegrounds for excuse by appeal to a di↵erent feature of moral agency. Deficits in moralcommunication seem like a plausible site of normative di↵erence between children andadults, but they may just be the consequence of a deeper kind of disconnect betweenchildren’s agency and actions. I consider this possibility next.

3. The Self-Constitution View

The nature of moral communication seems important for an account of our moral prac-tice. But it is plausible that this intuition is actually responding to some deeper fact aboutmoral agency which explains why children are especially poor moral communicators in thefirst place. This deeper fact is that children do not have su�ciently well-established ratio-nal or moral perspectives. This fact about them might then be used to explain both theirdeficits in moral communication and the underlying reason for thinking that such a deficitamounts to an excusing condition. I will call this the self-constitution view:

(SC): Children’s agency is not su�ciently well-established—they lack thekind of autonomy-generating rational agency to which we can plausiblyattribute responsibility.

The problem, from the perspective of this view, is not simply that children find it di�cult toadhere to rational principles of action (everyone struggles with this). It’s that children havenothing which counts as a su�ciently principled self-conception in the first place. Accordingto Schapiro, childhood ‘systematically undermines [a child’s] capacity to make choices whichare her own,’ because children cannot establish, reflect, or act on the type of principlesnecessary to make autonomous and morally responsible choices.17 As they develop childrenmake the switch from following their impulses to guiding them by ‘carving out a spacebetween themselves and their first-order desires and perceptions [by establishing] ... a

17Schapiro (2003) op. cit., p. 585. The flip-side of this reasoning explains parental duties, which cannotbe based on children’s sovereign personhood. Only rationally autonomous adults can have willings thatdemand respect even when others think they’re imprudent. Parents (and other adults) have duties to helpand not to harm children largely because of what the will become, and not what they currently are.


deliberative perspective that speaks for them ... [and] constitutions on the basis of whichthe words and deeds they produce will come to count as exercises of their own wills.’18

There are two aspects of a self-constitution which stand out as particularly relevanthere—the authority over which deliberative perspective one takes up and the stability ofthat perspective once one takes it up. Since the principles which make up one’s deliber-ative perspective (at least in moral contexts) are not pre-programmed into us, we must‘constitute’ ourselves by choosing the principles which will guide our actions from manycontrasting alternatives. Being authoritative with respect to this choice is part of whatgrounds a person’s claim to responsibility for the actions which flow from the perspec-tive she takes up. Without an established self-constitution, children simply cannot makesuch claims. A stable self-constitution is one which is enduring and not easily abandoned.Robert Noggle argues that the ability to project into the future and consider how one’sinterests will be satisfied seems like a crucially adult trait, and something with which chil-dren struggle. Adults have a more ‘temporally extended agency,’ which ‘pursues a setof goals that remain fairly stable over time, [providing] for both her short and long-terminterests and needs.’19 Even if a person had authority over her deliberative perspective,a serious lack of stability about it would call her claims of responsibility into question.Children’s perspectives about what’s valuable appear to be fairly unstable, and are sub-stantially shaped by interactions with parents, rather than reflectively chosen. SC identifiesthe grounds for the normative adult/child distinction in children’s inability to take up anauthoritative and stable deliberative perspective which can support the judgment that oneis morally responsible.

Even though this story has a lot going for it, I still think we should reject SC. Aswith MC, there are both empirical and philosophical problems. What we know aboutchildren’s developmental psychology doesn’t support SC’s intended conclusion. To see this,we should look at each of the formal conditions proposed above. Stability is a plausiblerequirement for a deliberative perspective. If someone’s self-conception shifts radicallymoment to moment, or is entirely absent, we can assume this person is ‘unstable’ withrespect to the kinds of actions he judges right to do, not to mention our ability to predictand understand what he is doing, or to assign character traits to him in any coherentway. Yet, even if children are likely to change their self-conceptions over time, it is simplywrong to say that children do not have anything like stable deliberative perspectives. Theclosest notion in the psychology literature is ‘personality’ which is defined as ‘relativelystable dispositions to act in particular ways,’ and is something that psychologists agreemany children have by age 2 or 3.20 Some personality traits are stable in that they can be

18Schaprio (2003) op. cit., p. 586; cf. Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, andIntegrity. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 109-114; Korsgaard (1996) op. cit., p. 100.

19Noggle (2002) op. cit., p. 101, 105-106, (2005) op. cit., pp. 87-108. Schapiro (1999) op. cit., p. 729also addresses stability, as does Korsgaard (2009) op. cit., pp. 177-206, though she calls it ‘integrity,’ whichshe describes as the way a person’s principles manage the incentives and impulses she has now and willhave in the future.

20For a nice summary of some of this literature see Daniel Hart, Debra Burock, Bonita London, andRobert Atkins. ‘Prosocial Tendencies, Antisocial Behavior, and Moral Development’ in Alan Slater and


identified this early and tend to remain as the person ages.21 This has been demonstratedwith traits like shyness and aggression. Caspi’s longitudinal study of three-year-olds, forexample, followed subjects until they were fifteen, showing that these traits were persistentthroughout.22 Presumably, these behaviors are linked to a self-conception which makesshyness or aggression a plausible response to questions about how to behave.

But perhaps ‘personality’ and ‘character’ do not really capture the notion of a ‘delib-erative perspective.’23 Instead, they may have in mind rational principles of action whichdo not quite rise to the level of over-arching personality. The normative di↵erence be-tween children and adults might then be located in children’s inability to make principleddecisions because they lack a robust enough set of principles to permit autonomous andresponsible action. Maybe they can be shy or aggressive but, one might argue, these arenot exemplary of the complex personal motivations and characteristics that define adult-hood. Again, however, this seems to overstate the case dramatically. Intentional andpervasive interpersonal comparisons appear around age 8, along with relatively stable gen-eral self-concepts.24 These comparisons are essential for principled decision-making sincethey provide context for deciding the value of one action over another.

What about ‘authority’? We should distinguish between what we might call ‘principle-setting authority’ and ‘self-control authority.’ The former is authority over choosing one’sown principles of action, while the latter is authority over translating those principles intoaction. In either case, I think, authority fails to ground the normative di↵erence betweenchildren and adults. One potential problem with principle-setting authority is that adultsprobably do not have this kind of authority themselves.25 One of the implications of the‘situationist’ literature is supposedly that adults really have no idea what their motivationsare, despite their keen ability for confabulation. If adults do not have this kind of authoritythen one might argue that it is a mistake to make it the basis of the normative distinctionbetween adults and children.

This is a bit too quick a response, however. If many, or even most, adults lack authorityto the right degree this does not show that attaining some degree of self-constitutional

Gavin Bremner (eds.) An Introduction to Developmental Psychology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,2003), pp. 334-356.

21Cole et al. (2005) op. cit., p. 12-13; N.R. Crick, J.F. Casas, and M. Mosher, ‘Relational and OvertAggression in Preschool’, Developmental Psychology 33 (1997): 579-588.

22A. Caspi, B. Henry, R.O. McGee, T.E. Mo�tt, and P.A. Silva. ‘Temperamental Origins of Child andAdolescent Behavior Problems: From Age Three to Fifteen’, Child Development 66 (1995): 55-68.

23Even though this is sometimes exactly what authors who use the notion say (e.g. Schapiro (1999) op.cit. p. 730). This imprecision shows up in the legal literature as well. See, for example, Elizabeth Scottand Lawrence Steinberg (1995) op. cit., p. 799, who conflate ‘character’ and an authoritative perspectiveon choice in this way.

24D.N. Ruble and C.S. Dweck, ‘The Development of Self-Conceptions and Person Conceptions’ in NancyEisenberg (Ed.) Review of Personality and Social Psychology Vol 15: ‘Social Development’ (ThousandOaks, CA: Sage, 1995).

25John Doris, Lack of Character (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dana Nelkin, ‘Freedom,Responsibility, and the Challenge of Situationism’ Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Midwest Studies inPhilosophy, 29.1(Cambridge: Blackwell. 2005), pp. 181-206.


authority makes the di↵erence between children and adults. So, suppose the conclusionsof situationism turn out to be false, and adults do have su�ciently authoritative self-constitutions. This still would not show that children necessarily lack authority in theirself-constitutions, and if many children do turn out to have this kind of authority, then SCwill be committed to the claim that these children are responsible agents and authorityalone will not be su�cient to ground adult/child distinction. Ultimately, as I argue below,this is what proponents of SC should do, even though it means deviating significantlyfrom the traditional adult/child distinction. If the issue is simply whether children havedeliberative perspectives which sometimes ‘speak for them’ through their decisions, I thinkwe can expect that they will pass this test.

Evidence for self-control authority is trickier because it is di�cult to di↵erentiate betweenresisting an impulse on principle and and resisting an impulse as the automatic response tofear or threat. This epistemic problem is relevant to both children and adults. Still, thereis some (non-conclusive) evidence that children can resist impulses for principled reasons.Take, for example, experiments asking young children to resist playing with or peeking ata toy when apparently unobserved. While most children peek, many (about 25 percent)are able to resist this impulse.26 This, by itself, does not show that they are resistingfor principled reasons rather than simple response to authority. In each of these studies,however, children were observed reminding themselves not to transgress, either verbally orobviously struggling to resist transgressing. This is defeasible evidence of a capacity forauthoritative self-guidance.

The theoretical problems with SC are no less significant than the psychological ones.The crucial issue is that the normative distinction SC draws between children and adultsis a formal one: it is not based on the content of a person’s deliberative perspective, or ourbeliefs about the plausibility or goodness of the principles they select. Instead, SC claimsthat the di↵erence between adults and children is that children do not have constitutionsof the type which permit autonomous choice, regardless of their content or value. A child‘is not yet in a position to speak in her own voice,’ writes Schapiro, ‘because there is novoice which counts as her own.’27 Ultimately, a person might be morally criticized foradopting a particular practical identity over the alternatives, but this is a di↵erent kindof judgment which only applies to people who are already responsible agents. The verypossibility of moral responsibility, from the perspective of SC, rests on the agent’s abilityto adopt a stable and authoritative set of rational principles of action, regardless of theirreasonableness or quality. This is necessary for making the claim that we must respectadult decisions even when we think they are silly or morally bad. The argument is notthat children’s principles are imprudent or unlikely to produce good outcomes, but thatthey are unstable and children do not properly have authority over them.

26Genyue Fu, et al. ‘Young Children Can Tell Strategic Lies After committing a Transgression’ Journalof Experimental Child Psychology 113 (2012): 147-158; Grazyna Kochanska and Nazan Aksan, ‘ChildrensConscience and Self-Regulation’, Journal of Personality 74.6 (2006): 1587-1618; W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, andM.L. Rodriguez. ‘Delay of Gratification in Children’, Science 244 (1989): 933-938.

27Schapiro (1999) op. cit., p. 729.


The claims children tend to make about their guiding principles may not be particularlyinteresting to adults, but they can nevertheless play the functional role of providing astable and authoritative guide to behavior. Self-assessments like ‘I know about dinosaurs’and ‘I’m a good student’ are not complex self-concepts, but I don’t see why they fail to beself-concepts at all. Schapiro anticipates this objection and argues that such assessments,while they show some kind of stable self-concept, are not part of the ‘basic structure’ ofa person. She uses the Rawlsian term to identify the most central elements of a person’sidentity. The strategy is to constrain the focus to the ‘deepest’ elements of the self. Thisis, I believe, unfounded and essentially excludes children from robust agency by fiat. Thechildhood self-conceptions above may be less central to ‘who a person is,’ for example, thanprinciples which determine ‘where the impulse to pursue desired objects stands relative tothe impulse to relate to others on mutually acceptable terms.’28 But this reply changes thesubject from the formal features of adult constitutions (e.g. stability and authority) to thesubstantive elements of character we tend to think are good to have (e.g. competent self-management of self- and other-interest). Given the psychological evidence above, it seemslikely that some degree of formally principled behavior on the basis of some stable principlesof action is within the grasp of many children. Even simple self-conceptions like ‘I knowabout dinosaurs’ and ‘I’m a good student’ contain information about what one values (evenif only for a little while) and what one should do about it. Knowing about dinosaurs, andseeing this as important, is a reason I used as a child to surround myself with books andtoys, to adopt desires about going to the museum, and to start thinking about becomingan archeologist. Even though I, sadly, gave up on this self-conception, it definitely guidedmy behavior, gave me reasons to do things, and represented my values to others in veryvisible ways. Talk of the ‘basic structure’ is improperly motivated if all it is meant to dois maintain the adult/child distinction. Resisting this conclusion means identifying whatthis ’basic-ness’ consists in. I suspect, however, that resistance to accepting children’s self-conceptions as stable and authoritative has more to do with the perceived importance ofthose decisions than whether they actually have the form of authoritative decisions, as SCsupposes. Adults do not think much of value rests on whether a child hears Goodnight Moonover The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This does not mean that, from the child’s perspective,the decision isn’t authoritative or the upshot of reasonably stable preferences. Accordingto SC, a person’s making bad or less valuable choices is not by itself grounds for dismissingrespect for those choices, so long as the agent is autonomous. This depends on makingthe case that immaturity undercuts autonomy and therefore moral agency. My argumentthus far suggests that when we actually try to set a threshold for autonomous agency byappeal to the formal features of a self-constitution, we find that most children will pass it.The argument for grounding the adult/child distinction on self-constitution slides betweenformal and substantive considerations.

28Schapiro (1999) op. cit., p. 730.


4. The Normative Competence View

Arguments for children’s diminished responsibility tend to locate the excuse in the wrongplace: in their failure to achieve the basic elements of moral agency. Instead, I think weshould simply accept the conclusion that these views are trying to avoid: children, evenvery young ones, have access to moral agency and can be genuinely morally responsiblefor their actions. There is likely no di↵erence between adults and children with respectto the moral agency necessary for responsibility. Plausible features of moral agency arepresent far before what we intuitively consider normative adulthood, or are just as spottyfor adults as they are for children. Nevertheless, I do not think we should abandon ourbelief that children are less morally responsible than adults. This means we have to lookelsewhere for the relevant account of childrens partial responsibility. My replacement ideais that the normative adult/child distinction is based on children’s relatively poorer skillat successfully using the moral agency they do have when responding to social standardsfor behavior. Children have access to moral agency in many contexts, but they are not asgood at making that agency work for them in ways that are socially acceptable.

(NC): Children’s responsibility is diminished because (and to the degreethat) they are less competent at using features of their moral agency tomeet social demands.

The particular kind of competence I have in mind here is what some authors have callednormative competence.29 This is a large and varied collection of cognitive and volitionalskills through which moral agents identify and respond to normative information in theirenvironment. While bare moral agency requires the ability to respond to normative infor-mation, normative competence includes further skills at managing that responsive capacitywhich we continue to develop after we pass the threshold for moral agency. For example,it includes cognitive skills like recognizing normative information through a certain degreeof confounding situational data, or ‘situational noise.’ And it includes volitional skills likeimpulse suppression in the presence of particularly attractive but socially unacceptablebehaviors. What unites the skills of normative competence is that they are all aimed atmaking our agency work for us in responding to complex social imperatives. Children’snormative competence is reduced through inexperience and developmental deficits.

This suggests that there are really two aspects of responsibility at work here. On the onehand, the subjective ability to take responsibility for one’s actions depends on the devel-opment of basic skills at processing normative information in the environment. Developingthese abilities allows a person to take up an increasingly complex view about her relation-ship to others and her responsibility for her actions. On the other hand, the evaluativestandards which we use socially to determine whether someone is responsible are set byindependent evaluative beliefs about what sorts of skills we think people should have (i.e.that it would be good for them to have) and to what extent they should be able to exercise

29Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Wallace (1994) op.cit.; John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress: 1998); Watson (2004) op. cit., pp. 1-10; Brink (2004) op. cit.; David Brink and Dana Nelkin,‘Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility’ Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Vol. 1 (2013).


those skills competently. Judgments of responsibility, then, are complexly dependent on aperson’s ability to take responsibility for herself and what we take the demands of socialnorms to be. The excuse in immaturity does not rest on denying that children can morallycommunicate or adopt principled self-conceptions. It is based on the child’s inability tomeet the standard for being a good agent in a complex world of social information abouthow to behave. Deficits in the cognitive and volitional skills of normative competence ex-plain why children tend to be less good at meeting these standards, but it is the inabilityto meet them that grounds the excuse.

Children are typically presumed to be bad at these things, but this is a presumptionwhich can be rebutted by demonstrated ability. One of the advantages of a competence-based view is that it does not face the significant challenge of explaining how the nor-mative basis of the adult/child distinction remains binary while the conditions of agencyare progressive and developmental. This means that it does not permit very strong sta-tus distinctions between adults and children intended to show that paternalism is neverpermissible for adults or that responsibility cannot meaningfully be attributed to children.But I regard this as a benefit since it better matches our intuitions about particular cases.We can still explain the belief that adults have a claim against paternalism on the basis oftheir generally greater competence, though this claim will be defeasible given facts aboutthe agent and the particular case.

This permits much more complex and realistic accounts of moral excuse for children.The six-year-old shoplifter is a moral agent on my account. He has organizing principlesof action that issue from his sense of what he values. He is aware that there are normsthat govern this kind of thing as well. This makes him a potential target for real blame.What separates him from older children and adults is that they really ought to know bettergiven the fact that they are more normatively competent at navigating social demandsand their own impulses against them. With practice and education, he will learn whatis expected of him and develop cognitive skills for better recognizing and processing thisinformation. In fact, testing the limits of these demands by violating them and waiting tosee what happens is itself a way of practicing. But for now, he is much less likely to be ableto meet the social demands around him with the normative competencies he has, and forthis reason we are prepared to o↵er him an excuse and treat him as less responsible for hisbehavior. His youth is partially excusing to the extent that he is less good at recognizingthe relevant normative demands and acting on them.

Normative competence includes volitional skills in addition to these cognitive ones. Evenif a person can see what reasons there are to act, they may fail to be able to guide thosereasons into action. Self-control is clearly a problem for young children, though it would bea mistake to say that children are ‘unable’ to control themselves. We know, for example,that young children find it more di�cult to stop an action already in progress than to avoidstarting the action in the first place, which implies that they can prevent themselves fromdoing something that they desire to do.30 Adolescents have much better self-control thanchildren do, but there is still some reason to think that they face challenges. One argument

30Kochanska and Aksan (2006) op. cit.


for this appeals to relative di�culties in managing strong emotions.31 Emotional states suchas anger, humiliation, fear, and jealousy make it more di�cult for adolescents to act inways that they know they should. And to the extent that emotionally charged situationsmake it more di�cult to identify normative reasons, they pose an obstacle to competentjudgment. Thus, strong emotions may pose both volitional and cognitive challenges toacting well. Managing this is a kind of competence, and to the degree that this bothimpedes good behavior and is significantly harder for children and adolescents to do, weo↵er them an excuse.

NC is significantly di↵erent, and I believe better a better account of children’s partialresponsibility than MC or SC. Nevertheless, they still o↵er some important insights. Form-ing a stable and authoritative deliberative perspective may very well help a person makecompetent judgments in a wider set of cases, even if it is not necessary for making responsi-ble judgments in every case. And moral communication is surely an important part of oursocial practice of responsibility. It allows us to teach one another about existing normativedemands and how to meet them, but it is not what makes a person a responsible agentin the first place. Moreover, di↵erent contexts will demand di↵erent competences. Thereis, in my view, nothing which shows substantial normative competence to be beyond chil-dren’s reach in all contexts. There are also plenty of everyday contexts in which even veryyoung children are capable of competently responding to normative demands. The amountof cognitive and volitional skill a person needs to be responsible will depend on additionaljudgments about how much rationality and self-control we can reasonably expect peopleto have in particular types of circumstances.

Normal adults are presumed to be able to act competently in a wide range of cases,but there are still limits to this which we appeal to when trying to assess degrees ofresponsibility. Especially complex contexts make doing this much more di�cult. Thinkof the financial crisis and people taking out loans they couldn’t ultimately a↵ord. Orconsider soldiers, awash in adrenaline, noise, and fear, trying to make good judgmentsabout their responsibilities for the safety of non-combatants. Whether, and how much, wethink they are responsible for failures to meet social demands for good behavior in thesecases depends both on the kinds of normative competence we expect a person to have, thedegree to which the individual in question has them, and the particular demands of thesituation. The debate about how responsible these groups are for what they ultimately dodepends on whether we can reasonably expect normal adults to be normatively competentin this kind of setting. That is, it does not depend simply on whether they are rational,have a well-established self-constitution, or can respond to interpersonal criticism.

Adults are subject to normative incompetence in many contexts as well, and when wethink that this is not their fault or beyond what we could expect a person to handle, weare prepared to o↵er them an excuse in the same way we o↵er excuses to children. Theflip-side of this is that there are plenty of contexts in which even very young children

31Laurence Steinberg and Elizabeth Cau↵man, ‘Maturity of Judgment in Adolescence: PsychologicalFactors in Adolescent Decison Making’, Law and Human Behavior 20 (1996): 249-272; Carolyn Saarni‘Emotional Competence: A Developmental Perspective’ in Reuven Bar-On and James D. A. Parker (eds.)The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), pp. 68-91.


are capable of meeting these demands with ease. However, adults are more practiced atavoiding the conditions that produce duress, and have had more time to exercise thesecapacities. As a group they tend to be better at using them, but there is nothing like acategorical distinction to be drawn between adults and children here.

5. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I want to point out a way in which NC is particularly useful forlinking philosophical work on responsibility, research in psychology, and juvenile criminol-ogy. NC explains the grounds for excusing children from full responsibility. This allowsus to assess whether particular psychological and social di↵erences between children andadults are morally relevant. This is helpful in cases where it’s not at all obvious whethera psychological di↵erence is a morally relevant di↵erence.

Consider, for example, the e↵ects of peer pressure on juvenile bad behavior. We knowthat most juvenile crime is committed in the presence of confederate peers.32 Group influ-ences and peer pressure appear to present a relatively greater challenge for young peoplethan adults.33 Some authors writing about juvenile justice and punishment suspect thatpeer influence is therefore relevant for assessing juvenile responsibility.34 But is it? Norma-tive competence o↵ers a useful way to see whether peer influence is relevant in this way. If,from the perspective of a teenager, the presence of peers distorts the importance of somereasons for action, it poses an extra challenge for recognizing the reasons one actually has.We expect that adults can sort through this, but if this task is substantially more di�cultfor younger people it will make it harder for them to make good judgments—ones thatappropriately weight the value of their peers influences. Whether this added di�culty ismorally excusing ultimately depends on what we think it is reasonable for a teenager tobe able to do in the circumstances. But the grounds for the excuse will lie in whetherthat peer influence makes it too di�cult to identify the appropriate weight of the reasonsto which one is exposed. If we find out that peer influence warps the perceived value offollowing the crowd into bad behavior, then what we need to know is how significantly itdoes this, when, and what degree of resistance we can reasonably expect from adolescents.

Some may worry about all this that tying responsibility to normative competence willerase the possibility of confidently defending any of the distinctions we have traditionallydrawn between adults and children, many of which we use to defend our moral attitudesand legal practices. I accept this conclusion. If NC is correct, then there is nothing deeplyproblematic about saying that very young people can be fully morally responsible in some

32Franklin Zimring, ‘Penal Proportionality for the Young O↵ender: Notes on Immaturity, Capacity, andDiminished Responsibility’ in Thomas Grisso and Robert G. Schwartz (eds.) Youth on Trial (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 280-283.

33M.D. Reed and P.W. Roundtree. ‘Peer Pressure and Adolescent Substance Abuse’, Journal of Quan-titative Criminology 13.2 (1997): 143-180.

34Elizabeth Scott, Dickon Reppucci, and Jennifer L. Woolard, ‘Evaluating Adolescent Decision Makingin Legal Contexts’, Law and Human Behavior 19.3 (1995): 221-244; Laurence Steinberg and ElizabethCau↵man, ‘Maturity of Judgment in Adolescence: Psychosocial Factors in Adolescent Decision Making’,Law and Human Behavior 20 (1996): 249-272.


contexts. Given the environmental and developmental challenges they face, however, it isrelatively less common that they are. Moreover, we adults have a responsibility to designenvironments for children that do not vastly outstrip their competencies. Youth does notitself exempt someone from responsibility, though younger people are statistically morelikely to be normatively incompetent than are adults. This also means there is no concep-tual reason why adults cannot experience excusing failures of normative competence. Someadults may be excused, just as some children may not. Thus, for normative competenceviews, the adult/child distinction simply notes the relatively greater empirical frequencywith which children are excused. It does not mark a di↵erence in kind between childand adult agents. This is a realistic picture of developmental agency. Within the socialpractices where youths excusing properties are an issue, I think this complexity should beespecially welcome. As children grow up, and the consequences of their behavior becomemore serious, we need theories of responsibility that reflect their genuinely transitionalstatus.

Blaming the Kids: Children's Agency and Diminished Responsibility

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