Many recent phenomena in the moral reasoning literature demonstrate coherence-based reasoning, among them, the construction of morally culpable agents, the construction of victims and harms, and altered beliefs about the effectiveness and consequences of policies with moral implications.
Thus an instrumentalist approach to the justification of criminal law seems to leave it as something of an open question whether the law should criminalize only immoral conduct, or should subject only morally culpable agents to criminal liability.
This is, as it stands, a wholly non-instrumentalist, intrinsicalist account of the proper purpose of the criminal law: it has no purpose beyond itself, beyond the punishment of culpable agents for their immoral conduct; it does not even, apparently, aim to reduce the incidence of such conduct.
If the subjective response (appearance of symptoms) of test subjects is able to discriminate between exposure to test chemicals and placebos, in a blinded design, this would suggest the operation of a toxicological mechanism in which culpable agents interact with tissue targets to trigger a receptor-mediated pathophysiological response.
More realistically, the cost of paying the judgment will be borne not by the culpable corporate agents, but by the corporation's customers.
Perhaps, too, we can forgive even non-culpable moral agents or subjects, for example, those whose disabilities create hardships for people charged with their care.
Since first seeing our MAP RNA data [6], we have posited in private, in peer reviewing manuscripts [3], [7], [8], and at professional congresses that MAP is the primary and most culpable, potential etiological agent for some or all of IBD.
In 2003, when he was chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, Larry Thompson wrote that a factor in whether a company, as opposed to individuals, would be charged with a crime would be the extent of its cooperation, one measure of which "is whether the corporation appears to be protecting its culpable employees and agents," among other things, "through the advancing of attorneys fees".
According to Kant, what matters in morality is one's motivation, and a moral agent is culpable only to the extent that her actions depend on factors under her control.
"The surviving agents were not culpable, and no criminal charges are being pursued," she said.
