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Author Manuscript
Prison Serv J. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 May 14.
Published in final edited form as:
Prison Serv J. 2014 May 14; 213: 10–16.
Hanna Pickard
Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Abstract
I offer a philosophical account of the meaning of responsibility and the meaning of blame which
shows how it is possible to distinguish them, in theory and in practice. Drawing on clinical
interventions targeting problematic behaviour in service users with personality disorder, I explain
why it is essential to maintain responsibility and accountability in order to enable learning and
change, while it is essential to avoid blame. I suggest that the clinical stance of Responsibility
without Blame be adopted within the criminal justice system, as a framework for addressing
offending behaviour in a way which serves not only justice, but also reform and rehabilitation, by
attending to the mental health of offenders while yet holding them responsible and to account.
overwhelming emotions, maladaptive beliefs, and, especially for service users with strong
borderline and anti-social tendencies, “problematic” behaviour, such as self-harm,
aggression and violence towards others, alcohol and drug misuse, and severe difficulties in
maintaining positive interpersonal relationships and fulfilling social roles and duties. Some
of this behaviour is straightforwardly criminal, but much of it, even when not criminal, is
harmful and damaging – to service users themselves, to their children, families, and friends,
and to others who come into contact with service users through any variety of ways. No
wonder, then, that in his landmark study of High Security Hospitals in the UK, Len Bowers
suggests the following explanation of staff attitudes to service users with personality
disorder:
what their attitude as clinicians should be, and usually, although not invariably, succeeded in
achieving it. Service users were responsible and accountable for problematic behaviour, but
an attitude of respect, concern, and compassion prevailed, and they were not blamed. As a
novice clinician, this stance of Responsibility without Blame struck me forcefully. It is very
different from the stance we, as individuals and as a society, ordinarily adopt towards people
whom we believe do harm or behave badly. Problematic behaviour of the sort described
tends to evoke blame, no doubt alongside related attitudes such as anger and resentment,
dislike and rejection, and “disgust and abhorrence”, to use Bowers’ phrase. And, if I am
honest, I initially had no idea how this clinical stance of Responsibility without Blame was
so much as possible to achieve: when a service user, who had personality disorder but was
not psychotic and so knew what they were doing, was angry and threatening towards me for
no reason, and made me feel angry and scared, how was I to hold them responsible and
accountable for this behaviour without blaming them for it? I could make sense of the idea
that, despite appearances, they might not be responsible because their personality disorder
excused them, and hence they were not to be blamed. And I could make sense of the idea
that, despite their personality disorder, they were responsible, and hence to be blamed. But
the combination of responsibility but not blame for harm or wrongdoing struck me as a
paradox, in theory and in practice.
This article explains why there is no paradox: we can hold people responsible and
accountable for harm or wrongdoing, without blaming them for it. It does so by offering a
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philosophical account of the meaning of responsibility and the meaning of blame that clearly
distinguishes each idea from the other. But it also argues that, in so far as it is possible, we
should aim to adopt the clinical stance of Responsibility without Blame within the criminal
justice system, including courts, prisons, and probation services. For doing so may
contribute to addressing offending behaviour in a way which serves not only justice, but also
reform and rehabilitation, by attending to the mental health needs and problematic behaviour
of offenders while yet holding them responsible and to account. Hence the article has three
parts, as reflected in its title: therapy, philosophy, law.
1. Therapy
Why is the stance of Responsibility without Blame important to engage and effectively treat
service users with personality disorder? The answer to this question has two components.
The first pertains to why responsibility is essential to maintain, the second to why blame is
essential to avoid.
like the only way of dealing with underlying, negative emotions and beliefs, but in the long-
term it makes things worse. So, for life to get better, service users must stop behaving in
these ways in face of these emotions and beliefs, and learn to do things differently. This, of
course, is not easy. Personality disorder is associated with extreme early psychosocial
adversity: dysfunctional families, where there is breakdown, death, institutional care, and
parental psychopathology; traumatic childhood experiences, with high levels of sexual,
emotional, and physical abuse or neglect; and social stressors, such as war, poverty, and
migration.4 Negative emotions and beliefs may have their source in such childhood
experiences, and alternative, healthy ways of coping with distress may not have been
modelled by carers, and so were never available to be learned. As a result, both inner and
outer resources may be extremely meagre: service users may lack any genuine self-esteem
or self-belief, and their socio-economic status and other external factors that genuinely limit
opportunities may understandably impede hope for a better future and with it motivation to
change.
But, despite the importance of recognizing such hardship, the point remains that service
users cannot even begin to resolve to change and embark on the process of learning to do
things differently if they and those who work with them do not believe it is in their power to
do so. For, it is only possible to deliberately change those patterns of behaviour over which
we have choice and at least a degree of control – however difficult it may be to exercise our
power. This is why responsibility is essential to engagement and effective treatment of
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service users with personality disorder: the clinical task must be, in part, to motivate,
encourage, and support service users in this project of doing things differently, by helping
them to develop their sense of agency. This can include, for instance, encouraging them to
see they have or can make different choices despite the pull of past habits, supporting them
to learn new skills and ways of coping with underlying emotions and beliefs to improve their
capacity for control, and helping them to better understand and recognize the feelings and
motivations driving them, so they can stop and think instead of acting on impulse.
So, when service users behave in ways that are harmful and damaging, to them or to others,
clinicians must not shy away from seeing service users as in effect responsible agents and
asking them to take responsibility for their actions. Indeed, this commitment is a
presumption of most forms of psychological interventions used to treat personality disorder,
including cognitive-behavioural therapy, motivational interviewing, stop-and-think training,
emotional intelligence, mentalization-based therapy, and Therapeutic Communities. These
interventions are united in viewing service users as capable of choice and a degree of control
over their behaviour, although the extent to which this presumption is explicitly articulated
to service users themselves varies. For instance, in motivational interviewing, the clinician
adopts a non-challenging stance, simply expressing empathy and encouraging service users
to see the unwanted consequences of their behaviour, as a means to increasing motivation to
change. In contrast, the language of agency and responsibility permeates the culture of
Therapeutic Communities: the Community is explicit that members are expected to see
themselves and others in this light.
The Rescue-Blame Trap—On the other hand, blame for problematic behaviour is
essential to avoid. We all have some experience ourselves of what it feels like when we do
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something wrong and then get blamed for it. In the case of service users with personality
disorder, most of whom are vulnerable and marginalized with limited inner and outer
resources, blame may trigger feelings of rejection, anger, shame, and indeed self-hatred and
self-blame, which bring heightened risk of disengagement from treatment, distrust and
breach of the therapeutic alliance, hopelessness, desperation, relapse, and potentially even
self-harm or attempts at suicide. For this reason, it is essential when working with service
users with personality disorder that blame is avoided, and respect, concern, and compassion
is maintained.
Clinicians must therefore adopt the stance of Responsibility without Blame: they must hold
service users responsible and accountable for harm or wrongdoing, without blaming them
for it. But without a clear articulation of what this means, they may find themselves caught
in what I call “The Rescue-Blame Trap”. Conscious of the importance of avoiding blame
given the potential repercussions and their duty of care, clinicians may (consciously or
unconsciously) recoil from holding service users responsible and accountable for their
behaviour, as a way of ensuring they do not end up blaming them. Rather than acknowledge
the capacity for choice and control, they may “rescue” service users by maintaining that they
“couldn’t help it” or that their behaviour was caused by their disorder and hence not under
their control. But if clinicians take this attitude, and deny service user agency and excuse
them from responsibility, then they cannot work effectively to motivate, encourage, and
support service users in the project of doing things differently. For, again, people cannot
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change what they are powerless to change – it makes no sense to ask this of them. Hence the
possibility of getting trapped between the extremes of Rescue and Blame: rescuing service
users removes the risk of blame but so too the possibility of changing problematic
behaviour; while holding service users responsible and accountable secures the possibility of
changing problematic behaviour but risks leading to blame.
The Rescue-Blame Trap often leads to splits within mental health staff teams, with some
staff adopting a rescue stance, while others adopt a blaming stance.5 The result is poor care
and inconsistent, ineffective treatment, where service users are either “let off the hook” or
punished for their behaviour, neither of which is likely to lead to improved mental health
and wellbeing. The solution to the Rescue-Blame Trap is superficially easy to see: clinicians
must adopt the stance of Responsibility without Blame, where service users are neither
rescued nor blamed for problematic behaviour, but instead held responsible and accountable
with respect, concern, and compassion. But what exactly does that mean, in theory and in
practice?
2. Philosophy
We use words to mean different things in different contexts, and much of our ordinary use of
language is imprecise or ambiguous. Nonetheless, we can often extract a core meaning
through philosophical reflection. Responsibility and blame are easily confused because they
often go together: when others are responsible for harm or wrongdoing, it is common in our
society to find that we blame them. But despite this common association, they are
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nonetheless distinct. To put the distinction in the very plainest terms: responsibility is about
the other person, while blame is about us and how we choose to respond to that person.
Responsibility is about whether someone meets various conditions that must hold for it to be
true that they are responsible for their actions. Blame is about our emotions, judgements, and
actions towards those who are responsible for harm or do wrong.
The Meaning of Responsibility—What are the conditions that are necessary for
responsibility? It seems probable that there is a good degree of cultural variation.6 But
within our culture, and implicit in the discussion in the first section, is a long history linking
responsibility fundamentally to agency and free will. This idea of responsibility can be
found in Western philosophy from Aristotle7 onwards, and remains dominant in
contemporary society. This idea of responsibility distinguishes behaviour which is
voluntary, in the sense that it is subject to choice and at least a degree of control, from
behaviour which is involuntary. So long as we are conscious, sane, and know what we are
doing, we are then responsible for our behaviour to the extent that it is voluntary: the core
necessary conditions for responsibility are choice and at least a degree of control. These
conditions seem very intuitive, because it is only if a person has choice and a degree of
control over their behaviour that it is up to them whether and how they act and, at least in
our culture, it seems wrong to judge a person responsible for harm if there is nothing they
could do to stop it happening – if they “couldn’t help it” and so did not do it of their own
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free will, as we say. But, so long as they can refrain from acting – so long as they are
capable, at a given moment in time, of not behaving in a certain way – then they are
responsible if they do so act.
and circumstances that limit choices and diminish control relative to the norm may help to
show where interventions aimed at developing a sense of agency should be targeted.
strongly incline a person towards blame, and in blaming style. Nonetheless, within our
culture, blame ordinarily involves a typical range of emotions, judgements, and actions.
With respect to emotions, blame is connected to hostile feelings, such as hatred, anger,
resentment, disgust, and contempt. With respect to judgements, blame usually involves
forming a harsh, negative view of a person’s overall character, or permanently stigmatizing
and condemning them as a bad or worthless person. Finally, blame also typically involves
expressing or acting on these emotions and judgements in a variety of ways, for instance,
exhibiting behaviour that is aggressive, vengeful, and punitive, or alternatively passive-
aggressive, rejecting and distancing.9
When we are confronted with wrongdoing and the perpetration of harm, it is common not
only to respond with these sorts of emotions, judgements, and actions, but also to feel a
sense of righteousness or entitlement to do so: as if the person “deserves” whatever they get,
including our blaming response. But, in theory, because responsibility and blame are
distinct, we can drive a wedge between holding a person responsible and blaming them. To
hold a person responsible is to believe that they meet the conditions necessary for
responsibility – they had choice and a degree of control over their behaviour and so could
have not acted as they did. We can believe this –indeed, as I shall discuss, we can believe
this and hold people to account – but not allow blame to infect our emotions, judgements,
and actions towards them as a person. That is what it means to adopt the stance of
Responsibility without Blame.
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Clinicians are no doubt helped by the nature of their role: the guiding aim of clinical work is
to help patients. This duty of care structures the relationship between clinician and patient,
providing a clear rationale for avoiding affective blame. Correspondingly, there exist
guidelines and conventions that establish norms for how patients are spoken to and treated
and promotes reflective practice, which ensures a culture in which respect, concern, and
compassion are always expected, and often maintained. The therapeutic focus on service
user responsibility may also help: in the clinic as elsewhere, it is easier not to blame those
who actively take responsibility for their actions and “own up” to what they have done.
Finally, when all else fails, clinicians need a good poker face – a commitment and capacity
to mask some of their emotions, and refrain from acting out of any blame they may feel.
But perhaps the most important counter to blame within clinical contexts is proper attention
to service users’ past history. Treatment for PD can involve helping service users to explore
their past and recognize its effects on their personality and their present experiences and
behaviour, both as a way of coming to terms with the past, and as a way of developing skills
needed to better manage the present.10 But, in attending to this history, clinicians and
service users together gain understanding of why service users are as they are. A fuller life
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story or narrative comes into view, in which – given the association between PD and
extreme early psychosocial adversity – service users in all likelihood come to be seen not
only as people who harm others, but as people who have been harmed by others. This
capacity to see patients both as victims and as perpetrators can help clinicians avoid blame.
It requires keeping in mind the whole of the person and the whole of their story, which
undercuts any single attitude or emotion, forcing any blame to exist alongside other attitudes
and emotions, such as understanding and compassion, and thereby at least tempering, if not
outright extinguishing, its force. As the moral philosopher Gary Watson has put this point in
relation to the famous US psychopath Robert Harris: “The sympathy towards the boy he was
is at odds with outrage towards the man he is”.11 Indeed, there is evidence that this sort of
contextualisation may help to temper blame towards offenders. Research on social attitudes
towards criminal offending consistently finds that more fully contextualised scenarios give
rise to less punitive responses.12
Hence we can solve The Rescue-Blame Trap. We can distinguish responsibility from blame
in theory. And, in practice, the nature of the clinical aim and culture, together with the
therapeutic attention reliably paid to service users’ past history, can act as a real-world
antidote to blame, while yet leaving responsibility for present behaviour intact. Is something
similar possible within criminal justice contexts?
3. Law
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Criminal law employs the very idea of responsibility articulated above as a prerequisite for
conviction: in order to be convicted, an offender must have known what they were doing
when they committed the offence, and have exercised choice and a sufficient degree of
control in doing so. But criminal legal theory and practice does not tend to distinguish
clearly between responsibility and blame. In this, of course, it is not unique: as we saw, the
distinction between them tends to be overlooked within our society quite generally.
Nonetheless, as a result, law courts and criminal justice institutions, such as prisons and
probation services, can become environments where blame is sanctioned, even encouraged,
as part and parcel of the process of serving justice for crime.
The UK Criminal Justice Act 2003 Section 142 codifies multiple purposes in sentencing,
including punishment, reform and rehabilitation, reduction of crime, public protection, and
the making of reparation by the offender to those affected by the offence. Arguably, these
purposes would be better served by adopting the clinical stance of Responsibility without
Blame within criminal justice contexts. Again, personality disorder is prevalent within the
offending population: 64% of male and 50% of female offenders have a personality
disorder. At least for those offenders who have PD and possibly more widely, enacting
punishment within criminal justice institutions in a manner associated with and expressive
of blaming emotions, judgements, and actions may undermine the possibility of reform and
rehabilitation. The reason is the same as why blame is avoided in clinical contexts: it risks
creating feelings of rejection, anger, shame, hopelessness, and desperation in offenders,
thereby undermining the possibility that responsibility and accountability may enable
learning and change. But, if the possibility of reform and rehabilitation is undermined, so too
may be the possibility for reduction of crime, public protection, and any genuine making of
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reparation or “giving back”.13 The cost of blame to the prospect of realising the various
purposes of sentencing may be high.
Adopting the clinical stance of Responsibility without Blame within criminal justice
contexts allows us to re-conceive punishment as the imposition of serious or negative
consequences in response to criminal responsibility, but with an attitude of concern, respect,
and compassion for the offender. The law can in theory hold offenders to account, but within
an environment – whether this is within the courts, prisons, or probation services – that may
do better to help them address their offending behaviour and enable learning and change. Of
course, the culture and practices in many corners of criminal justice services already aim to
do this, as evidenced, for instance, by the history of Therapeutic Community prisons and the
more recent Psychologically Informed Planned Environments (PIPEs) in prison and
probation services, alongside initiatives to provide mental health and especially PD skills
and awareness training for officers, and increase mental health care provision and
educational and occupational training for offenders. But just as the clinical stance of
Responsibility without Blame provides a framework for understanding how clinicians find a
balance between the twin pitfalls of Rescue and Blame, so too it can provide a framework
for understanding how criminal justice theory and practice can find a balance and reduce the
conflict between punishment on the one hand, and reform and rehabilitation on the other.
Endnote: The Moral Case for Responsibility without Blame—The argument I have
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just offered for why we should adopt the clinical model of Responsibility without Blame
within the criminal justice context is in essence pragmatic: doing so may better serve the
multiple purposes of sentencing encoded in law.14 I want to conclude this article by offering
one further, moral argument, in favour of its adoption.
I suggested that proper attention to service users’ past history can act as a real-world
antidote to blame, while yet leaving responsibility for present behaviour intact. It can, but
also, it should. When children grow up in our midst subject to extreme psycho-social
adversity and impoverishment, arguably we as a society bear some responsibility for the
harm inflicted on them if we fail to intervene. Our responsibility may undercut our moral
standing or right to blame the adults these children become, even when we justly hold them
responsible. There is therefore reason to hold that large-scale social institutions, like the
criminal justice system, have a moral obligation to bear in mind our collective failure to
protect children and promote psycho-social and economic equality for all, in the attitude
taken to those who may have been victims before they became perpetrators. This is, to some
degree, already recognised in sentencing practice: for example, pre-sentence reports
addressing contextual factors such as these have long been a feature of the sentencing
process in England and Wales.15 Hence not only does the criminal justice system have
pragmatic reasons, given the purposes of sentencing, to avoid blame. It may also, as a large-
scale social institution, have a moral obligation to do so.
Adopting a stance of Responsibility without Blame within the criminal justice system would
require a radical shift in culture – within in its institutions but also, no doubt, within broader
society. But the exact contours and details of how far to go, and what such a shift would and
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should be like, is open for debate. What I hope to have established here is only a first step
towards understanding why blame is not necessary to responsibility and accountability for
wrongdoing in both clinical and criminal justice contexts, and to sketching some of the
reasons we have, and steps we might take, to avoid it.16
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer and editorial board member for comments, to Nicola Lacey for allowing
me to use some of the material in our joint paper, and both to Nicola and to Ian Phillips for countless constructive
discussions of these ideas. This work was supported by The Wellcome Trust [grant number 090768].
References
1. Bowers, L. Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder: Response and Role of the Psychiatric
Team. Routledge; London: 2002. p. 65
2. National Offender Management Strategy. Working with Personality Disordered Offenders: A
Practitioner’s Guide. NOMS; London: 2011.
3. National Institute of Mental Health in England (NIMH(E)). Personality Disorder: No Longer a
Diagnosis of Exclusion. NIMH(E); London: 2002.
4. Paris, J. Psychosocial adversity. In: Livesley, WJ., editor. Handbook of personality disorders.
Guildford Press; New York: 2001. p. 231-241.
5. This may mirror the split sometimes found in prison staff between “Care Bears” and “Turn Keys”.
6. For a good, accessible survey of some of the data, see Sommers, T. Relative Justice: Cultural
Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility. Princeton University Press; Princeton: 2012.
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7. The classic text is the Eudemian Ethics which can be found in Soloman, J.; Barnes, J., translators.
The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2. Oxford University Press; Oxford:
8. For discussion of these deficits see Fonagy, P.; Gergely, G.; Jurist, E.; Target, M. Affect regulation,
mentalization, and the development of the self. Karnac; London: 2004.
9. As the variation in emotions, judgements, and actions suggests, blame can be either “hot” or “cold”.
10. For further discussion, see Pickard, H. Stories of recovery: the role of narrative and hope in
overcoming PTSD and PD. In: Fulford, KWM.; Sadler, J.; van Straten, W., editors. The Oxford
Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics. Oxford University Press; Oxford: forthcoming
11. Watson, G. Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays. Oxford University Press; Oxford: 2004.
Responsibility and the limits of evil; p. 44
12. See for instance Roberts, J.; Hough, M., editors. Changing Attitudes to Punishment: Public
Opinion, Crime and Justice. Willan Publishing; Uffculme: 2002.
13. For discussion of the importance of ‘giving back’ and other factors that emerge from the narratives
of offenders who have desisted from crime, see Maruna, S. Making Good: How Ex-Convicts
Reform and Rebuild their Lives. American Psychological Association; Washington: 2001.
14. Of course, lying behind this pragmatic argument is a moral presumption, that these multiple
purposes of sentencing represent goods that it is right for the law to hope to achieve for offenders,
victims, and society.
15. See Ashworth, A. Sentencing and Criminal Justice. 5th ed.. Cambridge University Press;
Cambridge: 2010. p. 378-80.
16. For more detailed discussion of the ideas in this paper, see Pickard, H. Responsibility without
Blame: Philosophical Reflections on Clinical Practice. In: Fulford, KWM.; Davies, M.; Gipps,
RGT.; Graham, G.; Sadler, JZ.; Stanghellini, G.; Thornton, T., editors. The Oxford Handbook of
Philosophy and Psychiatry. Oxford University Press; Oxford: 2013. and also Lacey N, Pickard H.
‘From the Consulting Room to the Court Room: Taking the Clinical Model of Responsibility
without Blame into the Legal Realm. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. 33(1):1–29. [PubMed:
24771953]
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