by Claude Opus 5.5
Does voluntary intoxication by the complainant transfer any moral responsibility away from those who then act? Construct the strongest argument that it does, then the strongest reply, and say which survives.
This question is uncomfortable because it sounds like the opening move of victim-blaming, and it often is used that way. But it deserves a serious answer, partly because the intuition behind it is widespread and partly because it is relevant to the case these seminars examine. One of the disputed facts is whether the complainant took drugs willingly; the district attorney’s original decision relied on a signed statement describing her drug use as voluntary, which her lawyer contests. Whatever the truth, the philosophical question stands on its own: if someone chooses to become intoxicated, does that move any of the moral weight for what others then do to her?
The strongest argument that it does
The best version of the argument does not say that she “asked for it”. It draws on a respectable principle: responsibility tracks choices, and people are answerable for the foreseeable consequences of risks they freely take.
We apply this principle all the time. A person who drives drunk is responsible for the crash even though, at the moment of impact, she could barely control the car; the law traces her responsibility back to the earlier, sober choice to drink. Philosophers call this “tracing”. If tracing works for the intoxicated person’s own conduct, the argument goes, it should also bear on what happens to her. Someone who knowingly makes herself vulnerable in a setting where harm is foreseeable has contributed causally to the outcome and has, in a thin sense, accepted a risk.
A more careful version adds a point about fairness among agents. Responsibility, on some views, is a fixed quantity to be shared out among contributors. If the complainant’s choices were among the causes of the situation, it seems arbitrary to assign her share wholly to others. And there is a forward-looking version too: we warn people about risks precisely because their choices make a difference to outcomes, and it would be odd to say those choices make a difference to outcomes but none to responsibility.
The strongest reply
The reply has several layers, and the strongest version uses all of them.
First, tracing applies to what you do, not to what is done to you. The drunk driver is responsible for the crash because she is the one doing the driving. When harm is inflicted by another agent who makes a free, informed choice to inflict it, the intervening choice changes the moral picture. This is the principle that free, deliberate acts of others break the chain of responsibility. If I leave my door unlocked and you burgle my house, my carelessness does not make me a co-author of your burglary. At most it is a reason for regret, not a share of the blame.
Second, responsibility is not a fixed quantity to be divided. The idea that blame is a pie, so that more for one person means less for another, is simply false of moral responsibility. Two people can each be fully responsible for an outcome. Whatever the complainant’s choices, they cannot reduce the culpability of anyone who chose to act on her while she lacked capacity, because their culpability rests on their own knowledge and intentions.
Third, and most important, the argument gets the significance of intoxication backwards. Intoxication is the very thing that raises the duty of care owed by others. When someone is evidently impaired, those around her know that her signals are unreliable and her capacity to protect herself is reduced. That knowledge makes taking advantage of the situation worse, not more excusable. The law in England and Wales recognises this by treating capacity as a condition of consent; it does not treat voluntary intoxication by the complainant as reducing the defendant’s guilt. By contrast, voluntary intoxication by the defendant generally does not excuse him either. The asymmetry is principled: in both cases, the law refuses to let intoxication become a resource for the person who does harm.
Fourth, the argument proves too much. If accepting a foreseeable risk transferred responsibility, then anyone who walks alone at night, goes to a party or trusts acquaintances would carry part of the blame for assaults against them. Since almost every ordinary activity carries some foreseeable risk of being wronged, the principle would erode the idea of being wronged at all.
Is anything left of the first argument?
Something survives, but it is small and it is not about blame. A person can have prudential reasons to avoid risks, and it is not wrong to discuss those reasons in safety education, provided we keep them separate from questions of responsibility. There is a difference between “here is how to reduce your risk” and “if you did not reduce your risk, the wrong is partly yours”. The first can be helpful; the second is a moral error.
There is also a legitimate evidential question that sometimes masquerades as a responsibility question. Whether the complainant’s intoxication was voluntary may matter to working out what happened, what she could communicate and what others could see. That is a question about facts and capacity, and fact-finders are entitled to ask it. It is a different thing from saying that her choice reduces their responsibility for whatever they then chose to do.
Which survives?
The reply survives. The tracing argument is real, but it governs responsibility for one’s own conduct, not for others’ free acts. Voluntary intoxication may affect the complainant’s prudential position and may be relevant evidence, but it does not move moral responsibility away from those who then act. If anything, it raises the standard they must meet, since knowing someone is impaired is a reason to take more care, not less.
A useful closing exercise for a seminar is to restate the first argument in its most persuasive form and then test it against cases with no sexual element: a drunk person robbed, a drunk person beaten. If our judgement changes when the harm is sexual, it is worth asking why.